Anthony J Evans, the report’s author and an associate professor at the ESCP Europe business school, said that after a century of failure, the Bank’s control of money should be replaced with a system of “free banking”. Private banks would yet again be responsible for the supply of money, as they were in 18th and 19th century Scotland. This arrangement led to a period of greater financial stability than we experience today, the report claimed. Free banking delivered fewer banking crises, and more stability in the wider economy, it claimed. Inspired by the economic ideas of Nobel prize winners Milton Friedman and Friedrich Hayek, the report urged policymakers to learn the lessons of the Great Depression, when the US Federal Reserve failed to raise money supply enough to support the economy. This failure was repeated during the 2008 crash, the think-tank said, whereas a free banking system would have fanned the flames less in the pre-crisis period, and provided more water to put them out after. Rather than having a committee of experts deciding how to steer the economy, the process should be conducted with a “rule” for monetary policy, or by giving over control of money to the marketplace, the report said. Andy Haldane, the Bank’s chief economist, has said that he “dreams of the day when I am made redundant by a robot”, referring to the possibility that the MPC could be replaced by a simple rule for monetary policy. However, he argued that “at times of real change, rules tend to underperform… [and] give the wrong steer at the most critical moments”. He concluded that, for now, “humans still have a big role”.
MPC (ASI) proposes scrapping The Bank of England Monetary Policy Committee ( ASI ), and instead use quantitative easing instead of interest rates to conduct normal monetary policy, and abandon the existing inflation target in favour of targeting nominal Gross Domestic Product (GDP). Monetary Policy Committee was accused by ASI director, Eamon Butler , of doing a "very poor job of managing our money" and creating "artificial booms, followed by genuinely painful busts, through today of following their unreliable discretion".