"It was terrible. It was horrendous," she says, "I am a policy person, not politics."
Naturally, in her current status as a peer in the House of Lords she is most passionate about cross-party work, saying "all the stuff I've done and made any tiny difference on here has been when it's been working across the house with all different parties."
Interest rates must come down
Altmann is a long-standing critic of quantitative easing, saying it has gone on for too long and caused damage on several fronts.
"I believe that the central banks have sacrificed a lot of independence in the name of QE and that it is going to come back to bite them, and it's already starting."
The Bank of England's QE programme commenced in March 2009, shortly after the global financial crash, and it was not until February 2022 that it started to reverse this policy by beginning to sell the bonds it had purchased under QE.
"QE should never have lasted this long. The economy was growing, you had a period in the sort of early 2010s when inflation was actually quite high and the central banks kept on. I put that down to the thinking that QE was such a benefit for the wealthiest, most powerful groups."
According to Altmann, QE helped the government with its funding needs on the one hand and the asset-rich, as it inflated prices, on the other. This left little room for any sincere criticism of the policy.
"Yes, they dress it up as buying gilts to lower long-term interest rates.
"What that means in plain reality is that you are artificially inflating the price of government bonds, which determine in all the capital asset pricing models the base asset against which all other assets are priced.
"Therefore, if there's a huge buyer of government bonds, those who are selling government bonds suddenly have money to invest that they wouldn't otherwise have had, and that goes into other assets.
"It's ironic that this was against the backdrop of what was described as austerity."
She warns there is a serious risk that central banks have not realised how tight monetary policy now is because of quantitative tightening. "I genuinely think it's gone too far," she says.
When it comes to monetary policy she points to a possible lag effect of 18 months, not least because a significant number of mortgage borrowers are still on fixed rates.
The Financial Conduct Authority's latest data on mortgage switching found 74 per cent of mortgages were on fixed rate deals in late 2021, typically fixed for between 2 and 5 years.
