It’s Called Financial Repression, and Governments Around the World Are Doing It, by James Macintosh. Countries are adopting policies to encourage or require savings to be lent cheaply to the government.

[F]inancial repression [is] a broad category of government policies adopted to encourage or require savings to be lent cheaply to the government. Repressive policies were the norm in Western markets for decades following World War II. That was until the financial liberalization was begun by Margaret Thatcher in the U.K. and then-President Ronald Reagan in the U.S.

New rules since the Lehman Brothers failure have again tightened the screws on lending to the private sector, while favoring government financing in multiple, complex ways, most obviously through exempting banks from holding capital against government debt.

Well the welfare state has to be financed somehow. The huge expectations of government built up during the easy bubble years of buoyant tax receipts from 1982 to 2007 haven’t gone away. Governments make the rules on producing  and managing their currencies, and they need more money, so it is obvious what is going to happen.