Bank summons boffins for urgent talks about QE

The City's leading economists were hauled into the Bank of England this morning for a detailed question and answer session on its quantitative easing programme, otherwise known as printing money.

Bank deputy governor Charlie Bean ran the meeting in a bid to better explain the policy, which has created some confusion and exaggerated price moves in the market.

Chief economist Spencer Dale and Paul Fisher, executive director for markets, was also there.

It is the first time in recent memory the Bank has called economists in at relatively short notice for such a session, although it has denied that this represented some sort of "crisis summit".

Among those invited to the briefing was Philip Shaw, economist at Investec, who said: "The monetary policy debate has become immensely technical so this meeting was a logical step.

"There's been a lot of interest in the markets about QE and possibly some people have been getting the wrong end of the stick."

Worries about QE have been partly blamed for the dramatic fall in the value of the pound in recent weeks. Just in the past fortnight, sterling has dropped about 10% against the dollar and euro.