ABSTRACT

The global financial crisis triggered a revolution in the central banking world. The development of ‘extraordinary’ monetary policies has been a central feature of the crisis response across the US, UK and Europe and has been portrayed as the most significant policy shift since the crisis. In contrast, we present the case that extraordinary monetary policies are characterised by an intensification of rather than a departure from previous monetary strategies. By foregrounding labour in our analysis, we show how the extraordinary monetary policy of the Bank of England is an intensification of a long-standing strategy to discipline labour through wage restraint and increased personal and household indebtedness. The result is that labour must navigate its conflicting roles a worker, consumer, and debtor. We argue that this strategy is now reaching its limits as the rising cost of household debt is driving up the effective minimum price of labour while the focus on inflation targeting seeks to suppress wage demands. The result is to destabilise the conditions necessary for the continuous renewal of British-based capitalist accumulation.

摘要

全球金融危机引发了中央银行界的一场革命。“非常规”货币政策的发展一直是美国、英国和欧洲危机应对的核心特征，并被描述为危机以来最重要的政策转变。相比之下，我们提出了一个案例，即非常规货币政策的特点是强化而不是背离先前的货币策略。通过在我们的分析中突出劳动力，我们展示了英格兰银行的非凡货币政策如何强化通过工资限制和增加个人和家庭债务来约束劳动力的长期战略。结果是，劳动力必须应对其作为工人、消费者和债务人的相互冲突的角色。我们认为，由于家庭债务成本的上升正在推高有效的最低劳动力价格，而对通胀目标的关注旨在抑制工资需求，我们认为这一策略现在已达到极限。结果是破坏了以英国为基础的资本主义积累不断更新所必需的条件。