The financial crisis and subsequent economic recession led to a rapid increase in the issuance of public debt. But large-scale purchases of bonds by the Federal Reserve, and other major central banks, have significantly reduced the scale and maturity of public debt that would otherwise have been...

After outlining some of the monetary developments associated with quantitative easing (QE), we measure the impact of the UK’s initial 2009–10 QE programme on bonds and other assets. First, we use a macro-finance yield curve both to create a counterfactual path for bond yields and to estimate...