Peter Jones: Charting the way forward is a mission impossible

ANYONE who pretends to know precisely how the Bank of England's latest little trick for re-starting the economy – quantitative easing – is going to work is doing exactly that: pretending. The horrid truth is that nobody knows how, or indeed whether, it will work.

The outcome that the government hopes for is that the quantity of money that the banks are able to lend will increase, and the cost of borrowing, particularly to businesses, will decrease. But nobody can guarantee that this will actually be the resul...