@justanotherneighinparadise we did print a lot of money in the last recession. It’s called quantitative easing. The problem with lots of extra money floating about is it causes inflation. Ie you might have £100 in your hand but you go to the shop and find a cucumber is now £25 and your favourite bar of chocolate £50.
That's not actually correct. It used to be, when money was quite literally printed, but now it's fiat - electronic - money, there is a built-in recall system.
Quantitative easing works like this: the Bank of England, being a central bank, buys up stocks in eg pension funds or gilts, and in doing so creates money that didn't previously exist. It's not true, as a previous poster said, that all banks can do this. They can't. Lloyds can only lend what they have themselves available to give. They can't create new currency. But a central bank, controlled by a government, can. The Federal Reserve, or the Bank of England.
So they buy these stocks, shares, or whatever and that pumps extra money into the system, easing strain and boosting the economy. They do this at a point when economically, the market forces are making inflation very low - even risking deflation, as happened in Japan in the last century - and therefore yes, it does slightly boost inflationary pressures. But when they printed currency and sent it out into the world, they had no way to control that inflation - hence the term runaway inflation. In Weimar Germany, after WW1, there were stories of people needing wheelbarrows to carry all the notes to pay their rent. But with electronic money, the solution is built in. If inflation starts to rise, that usually means the economy is starting to move again, so all the Central Banks need to do is sell the assets they bought using that newly created money, and then delete the money. Bam. Money gone, which in turn creates deflationary pressures, and reduces that inflation level.
That's how quantitive easing works.