Clive Crook, writing in Bloomberg View:
Another drawback of quantitative easing and other unorthodox interventions in financial markets is that they are fiscal as much as monetary operations. They transfer real resources. They expose taxpayers to risk, and involve implicit subsidies on a potentially enormous scale. How to allocate the costs and benefits of these operations across the economy is, or ought to be, a political question -- as political, say, as the design of the Troubled Assets Relief Program. In this setting, the usual case for central-bank independence loses all force.
