Post Crisis Unconventional Monetary Policy in the UK, the US, and the EA

This paper inspects the types and the sizes of the unconventional interventions of monetary authorities in the UK, the US, and the EU after the collapse of Lehman Brothers in 2008. It also describes the transmission channels through which the impact of the unconventional monetary policies is delivered into the wide economy, and it includes a survey of the literature of quantitative easing.The main findings can be summarized in three key points. First, the central banks of the UK, US and the Euro Area have employed asset purchase programs of different flavours and bought substantial amounts of different financial assets; mainly debt securities. Second, these asset purchases have led to a vast growth in the total assets of the Bank of England, the Federal Reserve and the Euro System which, in turn, reflected mainly on the size of commercial banks reserves with these central banks. Third, if the bank lending channel were to work, there should be a wide expansion in the size of the bank lending. However, the data suggests that there have been slight increases in commercial banks' credit relatively to the rises in amounts of reserves with the central banks. Accordingly, the bank lending channel seems to be blocked or not working for some reason or another