And for critics who argue that the Bank is creating an inflation time bomb by pumping billions more pounds into the system (it will be £325bn by May), Mr Fisher says: “We get the money back again at some point in the future, so it’s a reversible transaction.”
He is confident that without QE the economy would be in an even worse state than it now is, though, he does admit that “nobody pretends we can fine-tune this; the errors you can make on these calculations are very wide”.
Other than questions about whether the policy has actually worked or not, there is another interesting little twist to QE.
“There’s a slight thing we have to bear in mind,” Paul Fisher says, “that it’s illegal [under the Maastricht Treaty] for central banks to directly fund government spending, and we would fully support that.”
The problem is that governments do fund some spending through the selling of their debt, or bonds. So, to get round the difficulty, Paul Fisher says that the Bank of England does not buy gilts directly from the government.
He explains: “We don’t buy anything that the debt management office has issued in the week before or the week after our auctions. So we make sure that what we are buying is directly from the market… to separate it off from the idea of actually funding the government’s deficit directly.”
Some may see this as another bit of financial trickery.
For John Lanchester, with only a little bit of tongue-in-cheek, the QE policy is an example of the world of finance once again straying from reality and entering the realms of magic.
“It’s almost easier if you just say that there are elves who make money and, when the money elves get to work, they sort of magically come up with it and then there’s more of it,” he says.
“I think that’s probably more straightforward and makes just as much sense as explaining the mechanics of quantitative easing. It’s elves.”
Analysis is on BBC Radio 4 on Monday, 26 March at 20:30 BST and Sunday, 1 April at 21:30 BST.
You can listen again via the Radio 4 website or by downloading the podcast.
