Economics as intervention: Expert struggles over quantitative easing at the Bank of England.

This article examines how the Bank of England, as a technocratic institution, crafted its unconventional monetary policy intervention—specifically Quantitative Easing (QE)—between 2009 and 2016 when faced with limits to established governance frameworks. Drawing on interviews with former Bank personnel and documentary analysis, it argues that internal expert struggles led to a temporary replacement of the Bank’s dominant New Keynesian interpretive frame with a competing Monetarist frame, which emphasized money supply over interest rates and shaped the initial design of QE as government bond purchases. As these backstage disagreements became visible to external audiences, threatening the Bank’s expert authority, the institution attempted a fragile strategy of "manufactured consensus" by presenting a hybrid frontstage narrative combining elements of both frames; this ultimately failed, leading to the reinstatement of the New Keynesian frame and a reworking of policy to include forward guidance and private sector asset purchases. The study highlights the dynamic interplay between internal expert contestation and external demands in shaping central bank policy interventions and contributes to understanding the sociotechnical and political dimensions of technocratic governance during crisis periods.