Never Ending Debt: The false promise of Quantitative Esing
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2020-06-28
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en
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In March 2015, the European Central Bank (ECB) adopted a new unconventional monetary policy: Quantitative Easing (QE). The new monetary policy entailed multiple programs over a three-year period through which hundreds of billions of Euro’s worth of government and corporate bonds were purchased by the ECB from the secondary market. The aim of the programs was to stimulate inflation and economic growth throughout the Eurozone in the wake of the European Sovereign Debt Crisis. The use of these programs was highly contested and the effectiveness of the policy was questionable. In September 2019, almost a full year after the initial QE programs had ended, the ECB decided to restart its QE policy, despite criticisms from academics, society and the financial sector. This thesis seeks to explain why the ECB decided to adopt QE programs from a critical political economist perspective, specifically utilizing the main concepts from the Amsterdam Approach to Regulation Theory. Focusing on the interplay between structure and agency, this thesis argues that QE was adopted to regulate the instabilities in the Eurozone’s economy while facilitating further financializaton.
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Faculteit der Managementwetenschappen