In an opinion piece on its Reuters blog, British columnist and economist Anatole Kaletsky effectively endorses a one-time basic income as a fair and more effective version of central banks “quantitative easing” programmes.

Kaletsky shows how the United States created $2 trillion and the United Kingdom created £375 billion pounds out of thin air to buy bonds in two rounds of “quantitative easing.” It spent that money in bond markets, buying back government debt from bond traders in an effort to stimulate the economy. Kaletsky claims that, for the same amount of money, the U.S. government could distribute a dividend of “$6,500 for every man, woman and child, or $26,000 for a family of four.” Britain’s could be worth £6,000.

According to Kaletsky, “Giving away free money may sound too good to be true or wildly irresponsible, but it is exactly what the Fed and the Bank of Englad have been doing for bond traders and bankers since 2009. Directing QE to the general public would not only be much fairer but also more effective. . . . Even if only half the new money created were distributed in this way, these sums would be easily large enough to transform economic conditions, whether the people receiving these windfalls decided to spend them on extra consumption or save them and reduce debts.”

The full text of the article is online at:
https://blogs.reuters.com/anatole-kaletsky/2012/08/01/how-about-quantitative-easing-for-the-people/