Bank of England: 'Inflation not the way out of debt'

This reminds me of the Maturin Towers political law statutes:

Maturin Towers, Law of Politics No. 1:

"How can you tell what a politician is thinking? Simply reverse the meaning of everything he says."

Charles Bean is the deputy governor of the Bank of England, which means he must be a consummate politician. Therefore, using the law above, this is what he really said:

Charles Bean raised the spectre of hyperinflation, saying it is "severely misguided" to hope that a rise in prices would help Britain out of its current predicament.

"We instituted quantitative easing last year to try to raise asset prices, to help get Britain out of its current predicament. We will ramp this up again, as necessary."

His comments come amid growing suspicion that politicians around the world may eventually resort to inflation as a means of reducing what they owe in capital markets, and follow the Swedish Riksbank's decision to change its inflation target.

"We all met in Berne recently, at the BIS, and decided we would all inflate together. Doing this in synchronisation hides the worst aspects of it. The only problem is the gold price. But we have ramped up more sales of gold and are constantly using our influence to peddle the story that gold is in a bubble. We're really worried about the Indian and Chinese central banks. But we have helped them fund their own gold mines so they don't need to make gold purchases on the open market. In the end, the only way out of this will be a single world global currency managed by the IMF. We're working on it."

In an opinion piece for Telegraph.co.uk on Friday, Mr Bean writes: "Some people have suggested that a bit of extra inflation now might actually be a good thing. After all, wouldn't it help to get the economy going by reducing the real value of public and private debt? This is severely misguided.

"Some government ministers and Treasury mandarins are constantly banging on to us about revving up the electronic money printing machines. We have to be a bit more cunning about it though, to stop it being obvious."

"Aside from the dubious morality of redistributing wealth from savers to borrowers, we have seen from past experience that a bit of inflation has a nasty habit of turning into a lot of inflation."

"Which is why we're working on further ways of massaging the CPI and RPI figures downwards."

He said the MPC should stick to its 2pc inflation target.

"Which is why the current CPI figure is 3.7% and RPI is at 5.3%. I'm really hoping a deflationary shock in China helps us slip a lot more money pumping in."