Shaun Richards is an independent economist who specialises in inflation measurement and monetary economics. This follows a career in the City of London where he specialised in derivatives (mainly options) on interest rates and bonds. Shaun has also worked in Tokyo. He is a Bank of England watcher which covers the issues of monetary policy and money printing or quantitative easing (QE). Shaun also traded as a local on the London International Financial Futures Exchange where he mostly traded futures and options on future and present UK interest rates. This podcast was recorded on Wednesday, 22 March. Since then the US Federal Reserve and the Bank of England (BoE) have hiked rates by 0.25%. We cover the following in our conversation: The banking crisis: how did we get here? How are the central banks and governments responding? Inflation & interest rates And what's ahead? ***