Obviously, this strange beast called "QE2" is in the news a lot, and lots of folks are having their say. I'll have mine: It's wrong.

I'm with Mark Cuban. Unlike him, I'm not a billionaire. Like him, I am not an economist (thank god), and I agree with common sense. Common sense tells me that QE2 is wrong. Government solutions to market problems have failed in the past, and they will fail again.

Here are some of the reasons why QE2 is wrong:

1) It is repeating the exact same mistakes that Alan Greenspan made in the 1990s and 2002-2005. You create easy money, you create bubbles that crash and cause problems. You are giving more free money to the crack-head traders on Wall St. who caused most of our problems in the first place.

2) I'll repeat #1, because it's so hard for so many people to get: If artificially inflating assets has blew up in our face in the past, whey do we think it will work this time?

3) It's not a market solution. It will distort the market. Market distortions are not healthy.

4) Fed policy always works with a big lag. That's why they are always wrong. It's like the driver who overcorrects with the steering wheel. They are always micromanaging and oversteering.

5) The Fed talks a lot about "unintended consequences," but they tend to ignore them. The unintended consequences of low rates from 2002-2005 was a housing bubble and mortgage fraud. There is a high chance that the "unintended consequences of QE2" will be crude oil at $150 and copper at $5 a pound. That won't be good for the economy.

6) Before QE2, the Fed was already monetizing debt by using the roll-off in the mortage bonds to buy treasuries. Since they started doing that this summer, the economy and stock market had already started to stabilize. So this isn't QE2, it's really QE3. Now they want to increase that by 3X1? Talk about dangerous experiments.

7) Ben Bernanke, incredibly, says that QE2 is not printing money. Is this possibly the most disengenuous comment by a Federal official in the history of mankind? At the least, he is deceiving the American public.

8) QE2 makes it look like the Fed has become too politicized and has lost its independence.

9) I admit, I have a bias against bureaucratic academics who don't really understand how markets work. Bernanke is one of these. Jim Rogers is right.

 

This entry was posted on Wednesday, November 10, 2010 at 09:00 am and is filed under Macro.
Keywords: Federal Reserve, Ben Bernanke, Gold, Jim Rogers