© Matthew Buck Hack Cartoons

Mario Draghi, Governor of the European Central Bank is this week expected to announce massive program of government bond buying using something that looks almost exactly like ‘Quantitative easing’. This is a practice of increasing  ‘liquidity’ in the financial markets already followed the US Federal Reserve, the UK Bank of England and the Bank of Japan since the global financial crash of 2007/08.

In so far as anyone can tell, its major effect so far has been to devalue currencies, boost asset prices for the truly wealthy and delay a reckoning that the bankrupt private financial institutions are, arguably, overdue.