Before the Great Financial Crisis of 2008-09, significant reductions in official interest rates typically proved sufficient to generate sustainable economic recoveries from downturns. However, with economies and financial markets in freefall during the crisis despite a cut in interest rates to effectively zero, policymakers in some advanced economies launched a major new tool called quantitative easing (QE). This involved central banks purchasing huge amounts of financial assets. This book offers a thorough and perspicacious analysis of QE, which has become a recovery method of last resort. Whilst it was successful in averting another Great Depression and stimulating growth, it remains controversial and continues to promote widespread debate in economics, financial, and political-economy circles. This book is essential reading for anyone wishing to understand central banking in the national economy.

*SHORTLISTED FOR THE WAINWRIGHT PRIZE 2021* 'A wholly original, semi-autobiographical book on how to live, how to be calm and content with only a little, in a quietly humming garden' Daily Mail Beautifully illustrated, Seed to Dust is a reflective and restorative account of a life lived in harmony with nature. Marc Hamer has nurtured the same twelve acres of garden for decades. It's rarely visited so he is the only person who fully knows its secrets. But it's not his garden, and his relationship with its owner is at once distant and curiously intimate. In Seed to Dust, Marc takes us month-by-month through his experiences both working in the garden and outside it. We encounter new plants and wildlife, gardening folklore and the joys of manual work; we learn, too, about Marc's path from homelessness to family contentment, and the cycles of change that run through both the garden's life and our own. 'An absorbing combination of memoir, gardening folklore and natural history' Country Life 'Life-affirming... Absorbing' Sue Stuart-Smith, Sunday Times bestselling author of The Well-Gardened Mind

Before the Great Financial Crisis of 2008-09, significant reductions in official interest rates typically proved sufficient to generate sustainable economic recoveries from downturns. However, with economies and financial markets in freefall during the crisis despite a cut in interest rates to effectively zero, policymakers in some advanced economies launched a major new tool called quantitative easing (QE). This involved central banks purchasing huge amounts of financial assets. This book offers a thorough and perspicacious analysis of QE, which has become a recovery method of last resort. Whilst it was successful in averting another Great Depression and stimulating growth, it remains controversial and continues to promote widespread debate in economics, financial, and political-economy circles. This book is essential reading for anyone wishing to understand central banking in the national economy.