Monday 13 April 2015

How QE stacked the deck

Hillary Clinton is not alone in thinking “the deck is still stacked in favour of those at the top.”  But is she going to take a swing at the largest dealer stacking the deck that way?

Not a chance.

Who is that large dealer? It’s the US Federal Reserve Bank, architect since 2007 of Quantitative Easing, “the effect [of which] on the middle class, savers, and financial market stability is catastrophic and unlike the purported benefits of QE, the negative effects grow (in some cases exponentially) with each iteration.”

The end result is an entire class of savers devastated by negative real returns (even as the government is able to sustain what would otherwise be an unsustainable debt burden), a widening of the gap between the wealthy and everyone else (by virtue of the fact that the wealthy hold a larger percentage of the types of financial assets which benefit from QE), and perhaps most importantly, the inflation of asset bubbles and the fostering of market instability via manipulation and distortion. 

Whatever your view of what deck-stacking went on before 2007, to be blind to how Quantitative Easing stacked the deck thereafter would be criminal.

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