A list of twits who claimed three years ago that QE would result in rampant inflation.

See here. Niall Ferguson is amongst them, as might be expected.

One could add almost every Austrian on the face of planet Earth, Detlev Schlichterin particular.

Of course the absence of serious inflation over the last three years or so doesn’t prove that serious inflation sometime in the next five years is a total impossibility. The incompetents who have spent more time getting us out of the recession than we spent fighting WWII are obviously well qualified to make further mistakes.

But the basic point is that QE simply swaps monetary base for government debt, and those two are not much different in nature. Thus it’s nonsense to claim that the swap will result in in a drastic increase in demand and hence inflation.