Britain in grip of worst ever financial crisis, Bank of England governor fears

[malaise]

http://www.guardian.co.uk/business/2011/oct/06/britain-financial-crisis-quantitative-easing
<snip>
Sir Mervyn King expressed fears that Britain is in the grip of the world's worst ever financial crisis after the Bank of England announced it was injecting £75bn into the ailing economy.

The Bank's governor said the UK was suffering from a 1930s-style shortage of money and needed a second dose of quantitative easing to boost demand and prevent inflation falling too low.

Ed Balls, the shadow chancellor, said: "With our economy stagnated since last autumn David Cameron and George Osborne are now betting on a bailout from the Bank of England. The government's reckless policy of cutting spending and raising taxes too far and too fast is demonstrably not working. But rather than change course the government has spent the last week urging the Bank of England to step in and essentially print more money."

Some in the City were caught unawares by the scale and the timing of the Bank's move. Last month, only one of the nine members of the MPC, Adam Posen, voted for more QE, but the mood has changed in response to poor domestic news and concerns that Europe's sovereign debt crisis risks a repeat of the mayhem three years ago following the bankruptcy of the US investment bank Lehman Brothers.