Monetary Policy as Usual? The Bank of England’s Extraordinary Monetary Policies and the Disciplining of Labour

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.