• Tag Archives Federal Reserve

  • Andrew Huszar: Confessions of a Quantitative Easer

    Posted on by Azrael Comment

    Where are we today? The Fed keeps buying roughly $85 billion in bonds a month, chronically delaying so much as a minor QE taper. Over five years, its bond purchases have come to more than $4 trillion. Amazingly, in a supposedly free-market nation, QE has become the largest financial-markets intervention by any government in world history.

    And the impact? Even by the Fed’s sunniest calculations, aggressive QE over five years has generated only a few percentage points of U.S. growth. By contrast, experts outside the Fed, such as Mohammed El Erian at the Pimco investment firm, suggest that the Fed may have created and spent over $4 trillion for a total return of as little as 0.25% of GDP (i.e., a mere $40 billion bump in U.S. economic output). Both of those estimates indicate that QE isn’t really working.

    via Andrew Huszar: Confessions of a Quantitative Easer


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  • Rand Paul to place hold on Fed chair nominee

    Posted on by Azrael Comment

    Sen. Rand Paul (R-KY) has informed Majority Leader Harry Reid (D-NV) of his intention to place a hold on Federal Reserve chair nominee, Dr. Janet Yellen, until the chamber votes on S. 209, the Federal Reserve Transparency Act.

    “I am writing to convey my objection to floor consideration of the nomination of Dr. Janet Yellen to Chair the Board of Governors of the Federal Reserve without also considering legislation to bring much-needed transparency to the Fed,” wrote Paul in a letter to Reid, delivering on a threat he made last week.

    via Rand Paul to place hold on Fed chair nominee


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  • As the market panic demonstrates, central banks are stuck on a treadmill of money printing

    Posted on by Azrael Comment

    Oh what a tangled web central bankers weave when they practice to deceive… Last night’s panic in Tokyo, where the Nikkei dropped a stomach churning 7 per cent, demonstrates just how difficult it’s going to be for the world’s central banks to exit their loose money policies.

    It’s not even as if Ben Bernanke, chairman of the Fed, said he was planning to exit; in fact, initially he said the reverse in testimony to Congress. It was only in the Q & A, and in minutes to the last meeting of the Fed’s Open Markets Committee, that a clear bias emerged to slow the pace of asset purchases “in the next few meetings”, so long as the economic data was strong enough.

    What the subsequent violent gyrations in markets indicate is that any hint of applying the brakes risks generating a fresh financial crisis, which in turn would render the economic recovery still born. Both financial markets and the real economy have become addicted to “quantitative easing”, such that they can’t do without it.

    The upshot is that we are going to see financial repression of the type being practiced in virtually all the major advanced economies – including, if only to a more limited extent, the eurozone – continue out into the indefinite future.

    Full article: http://blogs.telegra … l-of-money-printing/


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