interspersed with leaks and rumors, that climaxed today with Chairman Ben Bernanke’s words of wisdom before the Congressional Joint Economic Committee. It whipped markets into a frenzy, drove the Dow up 500 points, knocked yields into historic basements, and caused gold, the safe-haven investment, to bounce up and down like a rubber ball. All this was peppered with the impending collapse and bailout of Spanish banks and an endless litany of other problems in the Eurozone whose miasma is drifting across the Atlantic and might infect the presidential campaign.
Yet Bernanke wasn’t totally gung-ho about more Quantitative Easing. The “economy must be monitored closely,” he said instead of promising the immediate restart of the printing press. On Tuesday, it was Richard Fisher, President of the Dallas Fed, who came out swinging against more quantitative easing despite the “hue and cry of financial markets.” He blamed the federal government for lack of direction in its tax and spending policies that leave businesses mired in uncertainty. The same day, James Bullard, President of the St. Louis Fed, didn’t think the jobs situation and the broader economy was bad enough for the Fed to pile into another round of ineffectual QE—maybe they were trying to stay out of a political minefield. Read.... Squeezing the Fed from both Sides.
On Wednesday, Vice Chair Janet Yellen took the opposite tack. Citing the still dismal job and housing markets, she pushed for more QE and more interest rate manipulation for an even longer period, probably for all times to come—ironically because the job and housing markets are precisely the markets that have not recovered since the Fed started its QE programs and zero-interest-rate policy (ZIRP) in December 2008, along with its massive corporate and bank bailouts.
The effect of the Fed’s policies on the job market can best be seen through the Employment-Population ratio, which measures the percentage of people age 16 and older who have jobs. It’s not perfect. But it’s the least corrupted employment number out there: it’s not seasonally adjusted, manipulated by the infamous “Birth Death Adjustment,” or mucked up in other ways. After peaking in April 2000 at 64.7%, it now hovers near its 30-year low—despite, or because of, the Fed’s policies:
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http://www.zerohedge.com/contributed/2012-06-07/big-lie?utm_source=feedburner&utm_medium=feed&utm_campaign=Feed%3A+zerohedge%2Ffeed+%28zero+hedge+-+on+a+long+enough+timeline%2C+the+survival+rate+for+everyone+drops+to+zero%29
QE doesn't friggin work!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!! WAKEUP ya bunch of zombies...........
Realist - Everybody in America is soft, and hates conflict. The cure for this, both in politics and social life, is the same -- hardihood. Give them raw truth.
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