It’s QE4ever, Baby! The Fed’s latest move back into quantitative easing took a quantum leap in a single day with last week’s rush announcement of major permanent money injections to begin this Tuesday. Since the Fed adamantly denies it is doing what it is doing — going back to quantitative easing (because they legally have to deny it) — we could just call it the Fed’s new quantitative mechanics. If we must avoid the term quantitative easing, as some writers are insisting we should, I’ve come up with the new term from the definition of quantum mechanics in which …
objects have characteristics of both particles and waves …. and there are limits to the precision with which quantities can be measured (the uncertainty principle)…. Quantum mechanics gradually arose from theories to explain observations which could not be reconciled with classical physics.
Thus, quantitative mechanics, seems to fit the Fed’s latest move, though I think I’ll just stay with QE4ever since it follows QE3. The Fed certainly exhibits great uncertainty about about the principle size of its new quantitatively massive injections of money. You’ll see in all the quotes below how large each dose will be and how long these emergency operations that are not an emergency will continue. All of it put in terms that are hard to quantify because they are always preceded with “at least.”
The money that matters will be created out of nothing yet will, “at least,” match previous rounds of QE in size. Like things in quantum mechanics that can be in two places in the same time or seem to be two different kinds of things at the same time, the new QE that isn’t QE is also not an emergency response, even though it had to be decided on, announced and started before the next Fed meeting arrives later this month. Though the Fed says it not easing, I will lay out below how it is easing in every respect. In short, it looks exactly like the old quantitative easing and functions exactly like the the old QE, so it Q-uacks like a duck and is a duck. The Fed says it is not because it has a different motivation, as if I care what their motivation is.
Read the rest here: http://thegreatrecession.info/blog/qe4ever-is-here/