Where has the money gone?
The stock of "broad money" (which is mostly not notes and coins, but the total of money that individuals and firms have in readily-accessible bank accounts) has been shrinking since late 2010, reports Martin Wolf in the Financial Times (16 June). This seems paradoxical. The Bank of England has been lending to commercial banks at exceptionally low rates, and spending £325 billion in "quantitative easing" (which means, essentially, replacing banks' holdings of less "cash-like" financial assets by actual cash). That should increase the stock of "broad money" in circulation. The problem is that...