Quote from trefoil:
I think all you guys are missing the bigger picture.
QE2 or whatever is a way for the Fed to pressure the ECB into some cooperative action vs the Asians - China, Japan, and South Korea principally.
Recall that in the ECB we have Jean Claude Trichet, a man so thick in skull that he was still raising rates in July of '08, long after it was obvious we were in the middle of some very deep fecal material.
As of now, the euro is rallying and the dollar is cratering. The yuan is tied to the dollar, which means, mirabile dictu, so is the yuan vs the euro. The pound is too, because the UK central bankers do, in fact, have a brain, unlike Trichet.
This is putting the squeeze on the Germans. Sooner or later the German business community is going to start putting the squeeze on their governmental authorities, who will in turn tell Trichet to jump. Trichet will then ask how high. Or low, as the case may be. When that happens, we will finally, finally, have a united front vs Asia.
Either we all hang together, or we will hang Europe separately, and prosper among ourselves. Europe's choice.