I voted for Obama because I thought he would make it illegal for people to be rich. Now after 7 years the rich are even richer. Trump has his muslims, Bernie has his Wall Street speculators. I don't know what the problem is, but it is somebody elses fault.
What Can One Expect from Negative Interest Rates?
- Thread starter schizo
- Start date
It might have saved the economy from the grip of death, but I ain't so sure it really helped that many individuals as you may suggest. I would love to provide counter-arguments on each of the points you've raised, but that would be too time-consuming. So allow me to raise a few important points in a broad stroke.
Has the quantitative easing worked? While the jury is still out on how effective the program as a whole was, here are some facts to consider.
- Background: The bond-buying program initiated by the U.S. Federal Reserve to buy immense piles of bonds, month after month after month, aka "quantitative easing" or QE, in a herculean effort to prevent a more dire economic situation abruptly came to an end in October 2014 after adding more than $4 trillion (did you hear that right??) to the Fed’s balance sheet. That is an amount roughly equal to the size of the German economy.
- But was QE effective? Its supporters say it has kept interest rates low for households and firms, stimulated job creation and saved the US economy from a much more severe downturn, perhaps even another Great Depression. Its critics, especially the ordinary folks, think otherwise. They believe all those asset purchases never really touched the lives of ordinary citizens the way it was meant to. The textbook version of how QE is supposed to work goes something like this: A central bank buys government and private bonds, which serves to lower interest rates. The reduced rates encourage businesses to borrow and invest in growth -- building factories, buying equipment and hiring workers. All the additional cash coursing through the economy flows to consumers’ pockets. Everyone wins.
- One study found that QE2 was only a third as effective as the first round of QE. Another paper, published by the San Francisco Federal Reserve Bank, found that QE2 added just 0.13 percentage points to the annual rate of economic growth in 2010, which was at 2.8% when the program was implemented.
- In 2012, after the first two rounds of QE in the U.S., then-Fed Chairman Ben S. Bernanke said the initiative created 2 million private-sector jobs. Even so, median household income in 2014 was $51,939, nearly 8 percent lower than in 2007, before the recession. As a result, household consumption, which is responsible for more than two-thirds of economic activity in the U.S., is still at “anemic” levels, Rutgers’ Huszar says. Huszar is so remorseful about his QE management role that in late 2013 he wrote a Wall Street Journal op-ed piece in which he apologized to taxpayers for the initiative’s failure to improve their lives. “The central bank continues to spin QE as a tool for helping Main Street,” he wrote. “But I’ve come to recognize the program for what it really is: the greatest backdoor Wall Street bailout of all time.” Huszar tells International Business Times that, in the beginning, the Fed’s initiative was defensible. The idea was that the central bank would stimulate lending -- to corporations, small-business owners and home buyers alike -- by infusing big banks with vast amounts of cash. The banks got the money, Huszar says, but they didn’t increase lending. Instead, large financial institutions “took that cash and invested it into stock and bond markets, healing themselves for their own benefit,” he says. All in all, "QE may have been driving down the wholesale cost for banks to make loans, but Wall Street was pocketing most of the extra cash," he argued in the last November.
- “The benefits have flowed to the very constituencies that don’t need it -- the wealthiest Americans and banks.” —Andrew Huszar, a senior fellow at Rutgers Business School and one of the managers of the Federal Reserve’s first round of QE in 2009 and 2010.
- “The people who are clamoring for QE in Europe are doing it for same reasons they did it in USA-- to boost the [financial] markets. But it has nothing to do with the real economy.” —Allan H. Meltzer, professor of political economy at Carnegie Mellon University.
http://www.bbc.com/news/business-29227597
http://www.ibtimes.com/was-qe-effec...questions-remain-about-its-success-us-1793564)
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aint that always the way. no matter how much you try to help the poor, it always helps the rich more. Sometimes I think the only way to get ahead is to become rich.
well that settles it. From now on I am going to be rich. That's the only way to make the system work for me.
Ah, the old "impossible to disprove assertion" again. QE saved jobs, did it? You somehow know how unemployment would have looked without QE? Tell me once again, oh ye of Fed worship, how it is precisely that the Fed can affect the unemployment rate directly? Consider in your attempt at answering that the world, and corporate America, is already at the saturation point when it comes to new debt.
As for "bread lines", SNAP is at all time highs in participation. Oops.
Mortgages resetting at higher rates? If rates were normalized from the get-go we'd never have had the housing bubble we did. The Fed gave us that speculative frenzy, and you're trying to give them credit for extending it?
Facilitate the various stimuli that created new jobs...are you trying to say the Fed monetized the debt allowing the administration to spend on stimulus? That's a good thing? How many jobs were "created and saved" again? Remember this chart?:
What a joke your analysis is! In the desperate attempt to paint the Fed as the "good guys", you've only just tried to congratulate the entity on it's wonderful job "sweeping up the pieces" of the vase it smashed all on it's own.
"Ahem, just the facts, ma'am."
That isn't even necessary. Just look at the jobs that have gained, and those that have not. Folks like Piezoe think it's a good thing when we drop manufacturing jobs, white collar jobs, etc and hire bartenders and waitresses.
The last part is where all of these Fed "saved the world" arguments should begin and end...They are responsible for creating the conditions that led to the crisis, so enabling them to go on an 8 year "experiment" to fight the problems of their own making doesn't fly...(of course, we know that Piezoe will shift the blame elsewhere in another one of his long-winded posts)