QE3: Helicopter Ben Bernanke Unleashes An All-Out Attack On The U.S. Dollar

You can’t accuse Federal Reserve Chairman Ben Bernanke of not living up to his nickname.  Back in 2002, Bernanke delivered a speech entitled “Deflation: Making Sure ‘It’ Doesn’t Happen Here” in which he referenced a statement by economist Milton Friedman about fighting deflation by dropping money from a helicopter.  Well, it might be time for a new nickname for Bernanke because what he did today was a lot more than drop money from a helicopter.  Today the Federal Reserve announced that QE3 will begin on Friday, but it is going to be much different from QE1 and QE2.  Both of those rounds of quantitative easing were of limited duration.  This time, the quantitative easing is going to be open-ended.  The Fed is going to buy 40 billion dollars worth of mortgage-backed securities per month until they have decided that the economy is in good enough shape to stop.  For those that get confused by terms like “quantitative easing” and “mortgage-backed securities”, what the Federal Reserve is essentially saying is this: “We’re going to print a bunch of money and buy stuff for as long as we feel it is necessary.”  In addition, the Federal Reserve has promised to keep interest rates at ultra-low levels all the way through mid-2015.  The course that the Federal Reserve has set us on is utter insanity.  Ben Bernanke can rain money down on us all he wants, but it is not going to do much at all to help the real economy.  However, it will definitely hasten the destruction of the U.S. dollar.

And the Federal Reserve is apparently very eager to get QE3 going.  Purchases of mortgage-backed securities are going to start on Friday.

In the coming months, hundreds of billions of dollars that the Federal Reserve has zapped into existence out of nothing will be injected into our financial system.

So what will happen to all of this new money?

If banks and financial institutions use that money to make loans then it could have somewhat of a positive impact on the economy in the short-term.

However, the truth is that it isn’t as if banks are hurting for cash to loan out.  In fact, right now banks are already sitting on $1.6 trillion in excess reserves.  Just like with the first two rounds of quantitative easing, a lot of the money from QE3 will likely end up being put on the shelf.

But the stock market loved the news because they know that the previous two rounds of quantitative easing have been great for the financial markets.  On Thursday, the stock market soared to levels not seen since December 2007.

There is much rejoicing on Wall Street right now.

And this stock market bounce is great for Bernanke’s good buddy Barack Obama.

Obama nominated Bernanke to a second term as Fed Chairman, and this might be Bernanke’s way of paying him back.

But of course the Fed is supposed to be “above politics” so that would never happen, right?

The Federal Reserve essentially “crossed the Rubicon” today.  No longer will quantitative easing be considered an “emergency measure”.  Rather, it will now be considered just another “tool” that the Fed uses in the normal course of business.

Considering how vulnerable the U.S. dollar already is, announcing an “open-ended” round of quantitative easing is utter foolishness.  According to the Fed, when you add the 40 billion dollars of new mortgage-backed security purchases per month to all of the other “easing” measures the Fed is continuing to do, the grand total is going to come to about 85 billion dollars a month.  The following is from the statement that the Fed released earlier today….

To support a stronger economic recovery and to help ensure that inflation, over time, is at the rate most consistent with its dual mandate, the Committee agreed today to increase policy accommodation by purchasing additional agency mortgage-backed securities at a pace of $40 billion per month. The Committee also will continue through the end of the year its program to extend the average maturity of its holdings of securities as announced in June, and it is maintaining its existing policy of reinvesting principal payments from its holdings of agency debt and agency mortgage-backed securities in agency mortgage-backed securities. These actions, which together will increase the Committee’s holdings of longer-term securities by about $85 billion each month through the end of the year, should put downward pressure on longer-term interest rates, support mortgage markets, and help to make broader financial conditions more accommodative.

The Committee will closely monitor incoming information on economic and financial developments in coming months. If the outlook for the labor market does not improve substantially, the Committee will continue its purchases of agency mortgage-backed securities, undertake additional asset purchases, and employ its other policy tools as appropriate until such improvement is achieved in a context of price stability. In determining the size, pace, and composition of its asset purchases, the Committee will, as always, take appropriate account of the likely efficacy and costs of such purchases.

So what does all of this mean?

I really like how one analyst put it when he described this announcement as a “I’m gonna ease till your eyes bleed kinda statement“.

The Fed also promised to keep interest rates at “exceptionally low levels” until mid-2015….

To support continued progress toward maximum employment and price stability, the Committee expects that a highly accommodative stance of monetary policy will remain appropriate for a considerable time after the economic recovery strengthens. In particular, the Committee also decided today to keep the target range for the federal funds rate at 0 to 1/4 percent and currently anticipates that exceptionally low levels for the federal funds rate are likely to be warranted at least through mid-2015.

It seems that whenever the U.S. economy gets into trouble, Bernanke and his friends at the Fed only have one prescription and it goes something like this….

“Print more money and promise to keep interest rates near zero even longer.”

Of course a lot of Republicans are quite disturbed that QE3 was announced with just a couple of months remaining in a very heated election battle.

Even big news organizations such as CNBC are commenting on this….

Though the Fed is ostensibly politically independent, the decision comes at a ticklish time with the presidential election less than two months away.

And without a doubt the mainstream media will be proclaiming this to be “good news” for the economy in the short-term.

But is QE3 really going to help the average person on the street?

Well, first let’s take a look at employment.  We are told that one of the primary reasons for QE3 is jobs.

But did QE1 and QE2 create jobs?

The answer is clearly no.

As you can see from the chart below, the percentage of working age Americans with a job fell dramatically during the last recession and has not bounced back since that time despite all of the quantitative easing that has been done already….

So why try the same thing again when it did not work the first two times?

But what more quantitative easing is likely to do is to pump up stock market values because a lot of the money from QE3 is going to end up being put into stocks and other investments.

This is going to help the wealthy get even wealthier, and it is going to make the “wealth gap” between the rich and the poor even larger in America.

QE3 is also probably going to cause commodity prices to rise just like QE1 and QE2 did.

That means that you will be paying more for gasoline, food and other basic necessities.

So there may not be more jobs, but at least you will get the privilege of paying more for things.

The inflation that QE3 will cause will be particularly cruel for those on fixed incomes such as retirees.

None of the extra money from QE3 is going to go into their pockets, but they will have to pay more to heat their homes and fill up their shopping carts.

And the “exceptionally low interest rate” policy of the Federal Reserve is absolutely devastating for those that have saved for retirement and that are relying on interest income for their living expenses.

In short, quantitative easing is very good for the wealthy and it is very bad for the average man and woman on the street.

But what else would you expect from the Federal Reserve?

It is imperative that we educate the American people about the Federal Reserve and about how they are destroying our economy.  For much more on this, please see my previous article entitled “10 Things That Every American Should Know About The Federal Reserve“.

Perhaps the biggest danger from QE3 is that it could greatly hasten the day when the U.S. dollar ceases to be the reserve currency of the world.

The rest of the world is not stupid.  They see that the Federal Reserve is now firing up the printing presses whenever they feel like it.  They can see the games that we are playing with our currency.

Why should the rest of the world continue to use the U.S. dollar to trade with one another when the United States is constantly debasing it and playing games with its value?

As I wrote about the other day, China and Russia have been calling for a new reserve currency for the world for several years.  They have been leading the charge to conduct international trade in currencies other than the U.S. dollar, and I have documented many of the major international agreements to move away from the U.S. dollar that have been made in the last couple of years.

The status of the U.S. dollar in the world has already been steadily slipping, and now Helicopter Ben Bernanke pulls this kind of nonsense.

We are handing the rest of the world an excuse to abandon the U.S. dollar on a silver platter.

And when the rest of the globe rejects the U.S. dollar as a reserve currency, the dollar will crash, the cost of living will increase dramatically, our standard of living will go way down and we will never fully recover from it.

So if you think that things are “bad” now, just wait until that happens.

The U.S. dollar is one of the best things that the U.S. economy still has going for it, and Helicopter Ben Bernanke is doing his best to absolutely destroy that.

What is your opinion of QE3?  Please feel free to post a comment with your thoughts below….

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19 Warnings About A Coming Global Financial Catastrophe

Global leaders have tried just about everything that they can think of, but the coming global financial catastrophe continues to march steadily toward us.  We have seen “stimulus packages”, quantitative easing, bond buying, interest rate cuts, emergency economic summits, bailout packages for banks, bailout packages for entire nations, “Operation Twist“, unprecedented government intervention in business and massive amounts of new government debt and yet nothing seems to revive the global economy.  In fact, it looks like we are rapidly heading into the second dip of a “double dip recession“.  Unfortunately, many believe that this next dip will be more like a full-blown depression.  All over the world, top economic experts are warning that we are facing an unprecedented crisis of debt and insolvency that will result in a global financial catastrophe.  The eurozone is drowning in debt, the U.S. government is drowning in debt and major banks all over the globe are drowning in debt.  Global authorities have been trying to patch the system together and keep it going, but the incredible damage that all of this debt has done is now becoming apparent to everyone.  The global debt bubble that has fueled prosperity in the western world for the last several decades is getting ready to burst, and when that happens the chaos that will result will be absolutely horrifying.

The following are 19 warnings about a coming global financial catastrophe….

1. ”Dr. Doom” Nouriel Roubini says that the rapidly approaching financial crisis will be even worse than 2008….

“Worse because like 2008 you will have an economic and financial crisis but unlike 2008, you are running out of policy bullets. In 2008, you could cut rates; do QE1, QE2; you could do fiscal stimulus; you could backstop/ringfence/guarantee banks and everybody else. Today, more QEs are becoming less and less effective because the problems are of solvency not liquidity. Fiscal deficits are already so large and you cannot bail out the banks because 1) there is a political opposition to it; and 2) governments are near-insolvent – they cannot bailout themselves let alone their banks. The problem is that we are running out of policy rabbits to pull out of the hat!”

2. John Embry….

“This situation is unprecedented. The world has never, ever been in a condition like this. As a result, anyone that is complacent here and says, ‘This is just business as usual,’ they are dead wrong and will be shocked at the chaos that is heading our way.”

3. Jim Rogers….

“Just because now you have a way to get them (the banks) to borrow even more money, this is not solving the problem, this is making the problem worse”

4. Prominent Spanish politician Felipe Gonzalez….

“We’re in a situation of total emergency, the worst crisis we have ever lived through”

5. Leader of the UK Independence Party Nigel Farage….

You know, this deal makes things worse not better. A hundred billion [euro] is put up for the Spanish banking system, and 20 per cent of that money has to come from Italy. And under the deal the Italians have to lend to the Spanish banks at 3 per cent but to get that money they have to borrow on the markets at 7 per cent. It‘s genius isn’t it. It really is brilliant.

So what we are doing with this package is we are actually driving countries like Italy towards needing to be bailed out themselves.

In addition to that, we put a further 10 per cent on Spanish national debt and I tell you, any banking analyst will tell you, 100 billion does not solve the Spanish banking problem, it would need to be more like 400 billion.

And with Greece teetering on the edge of Euro withdrawal, the real elephant in the room is that once Greece leaves, the ECB, the European Central Bank is bust. It’s gone.

It has 444 billion euros worth of exposure to the bailed-out countries and to rectify that you’ll need to have a cash call from Ireland, Spain, Portugal, Greece and Italy. You couldn’t make it up could you!

6. Peter Praet, chief economist at the European Central Bank….

“The eurozone crisis is now much more profound and fundamental than at the time of Lehman”

7. Graham Summers….

Angela Merkel is up for re-election next year. There is no way on earth she’ll opt to let Germany get dragged down by the EU. She’s even said she will not allow Eurobonds for “as long as [she] lives.”

This is not empty rhetoric. This is fact. Germany has expressed its intentions dozens of times in the last month: NO Eurobonds and NO guarantee of EU banking deposits.

The reasons for this are simple: EITHER option renders Germany insolvent. It’s already teetering on insolvency to begin with. But to allow Eurobonds or some kind of guarantee of the EU banking system to occur on top of the money Germany has already spent propping up the EU will take Germany down.

The German economy is already slowing. Most Germans are fed up with the Euro. Merkel would rather die than let her country become like Greece (which the creation of Eurobonds or EU deposit guarantees would most assuredly result in).

So Germany is tapped out as well. This leaves… NOBODY.

Again, Europe is out of money. End of story. This is the truth and investing based on the idea of some magical bailout occurring is like investing on Hank Paulson’s Bazooka policy for Fannie and Freddie (three months later the markets imploded).

8. Peter Schiff….

“I think we’re still in a depression. I think it’s going to be with us for years and years. It could be five or ten years; it could be longer, depending on how long it takes us to recognize our mistakes so that we can begin to reverse them”

9. New York Times columnist Paul Krugman….

“There are a lot of ugly forces being unleashed in our societies on both sides of the Atlantic because our economic policy has been such a dismal failure, because we are refusing to listen to the lessons of history. We may look back at this thirty years from now and say, ‘That is when it all fell apart.’ And by all, I don’t just mean the economy.”

10. IMF Managing Director Christine Lagarde….

“In the last few months, the global outlook has been more worrying for Europe, the United States and large emerging markets”

11. Andrew Kenningham, senior global economist at Capital Economics….

“With euro break-up risk likely to rise in the second half of the year and monetary policy looking increasingly impotent, things could get much worse before they get better.”

12. Zero Hedge….

“We now have 80% of the world posting a contraction in industrial activity.“

13. Lakshman Achuthan, the co-founder of the Economic Cycle Research Institute….

“What we said back in December was that we thought the most likely start date for the recession would be in Q1, and if not then, by the middle of 2012. I’m here to reaffirm that.

In other words, I think we’re in recession already. As I said back there, it’s very rare that you know you’re going into recession when you’re going into recession. It often takes some big hit on the top of the head. In the last recession it took Lehman to wake people up. In the recession before it took 9/11. 

When you look at the data today, you see industrial production is off of its April high. Manufacturing and trade sales – much broader than retail sales – is off of its December high.

Real personal income growth, which doesn’t always go negative during a recession, has been negative for several months.”

14. Priya Misra, head of U.S. rates strategy at Bank of America Merrill Lynch….

“The global economy is in the midst of a synchronized slowdown, as reinforced by the recent spate of weak economic data”

15. Chris Williamson, the chief economist at Markit….

“Companies are clearly preparing for worse to come, cutting back on both staff numbers and stocks of raw materials at the fastest rates for two-and-a-half years”

16. Howard Archer, chief European economist at IHS Global Insight….

“With the eurozone likely having suffered appreciable GDP contraction in the second quarter and in grave danger of contracting again in the third, and with eurozone business confidence generally low and fragile, the likelihood is that the eurozone unemployment rate will move significantly higher over the coming months”

17. Karl Denninger….

If we keep deficit spending we are simply debasing the purchasing power of the common man in a puerile attempt to pacify the people and avoid holding the financiers who were responsible for this debacle, including Bernanke, Greenspan, Paulson and Geithner along with both Obama and George W Bush to account.  This attempt is mathematically doomed to fail as median family income has not moved which means that we’re shifting an ever-greater part of the population to social programs like food stamps and other handouts while the taxpaying productive population continues to shrink. 

This is exactly how Greece and Spain went down the bowl and we’re right behind them unless we stop this crap right now.

We cannot “bend the curve” or look toward the “intermediate term”; that was exactly the siren song in Europe and it has led to catastrophe as “tomorrow” never comes!  The “intermediate term” is usually defined as three to five years out — we heard of the “intermediate term” in 2008 but now it’s 2012 and none of the retractions in that spending have occurred — the claim that they would be undertaken was a lie.

We must stop the stupid right now!

Arithmetic is a bitch.  It’s politically agnostic and cold-hearted.  Exponential growth, as I have repeatedly pointed out, is utterly unsustainable over the long term.  It doesn’t matter if you want these sorts of schemes to work or not; the longer you continue to pretend that there is some path forward that achieves these goals the worse the outcome is when you discover that you’re wrong.

18. LEAP/E2020….

“LEAP/E2020 has never seen the chronological convergence of such a series of explosive and so fundamental factors (economy, finances, geopolitical…) since 2006, the start of its work on the global systemic crisis. Logically, in our modest attempt to regularly publish a “crisis weather forecast”, we must therefore give our readers a “Red Alert” because the upcoming events which are readying themselves to shake the world system next September/ October belong to this category.”

19. Steve Quayle’s anonymous international banking source….

“The Bond market is finished, We all knew that there is a bubble in the bond market, This is the coup de grace that will not pop the bubble, but make it explode with the force of a thousand suns. America will be broke and barren in a blink of an eye! These are two events that I have been warning about are ones that will end your life on this planet as you know it. Your cash will be worthless, your country at a standstill, No money, No food, no essential services, AND WHEN IT ALL STOPS….. YOU STOP.”

So what do you think about these warnings?

Are you concerned that a global financial catastrophe is coming?

Please feel free to post a comment with your opinion below….

 

BUSINESS INSIDER: THE BEST FED SOURCE IN THE WORLD SAYS QEIII IS NOW ON THE TABLE

Editor’s note: This report by Joe Weisenthal originally appeared on Business Insider

The WSJ’s Jon Hilsenrath – whom Cardiff Garcia has dubbed “Fedwire” – reports that more Fed action is now officially on the table due to the slew of weak incoming data.

There’s no gaurantee that it will happen, or that if it did happen it would be at the June 20 meeting, but the presses are being warmed up.

Top Fed officials have said that they would support new measures if they became convinced the U.S. wasn’t making progress on bringing down unemployment. Recent disappointing employment reports have raised this possibility, but the data might be a temporary blip. Moreover, the Fed’s options for more easing are sure to stir internal resistance at the central bank if they are considered.

Their options include doing nothing and continuing to assess the economic outlook—or more strongly signaling a willingness to act later if the outlook more clearly worsens. Fed policy makers could take a small precautionary measure, like extending for a short period its “Operation Twist” program—in which the Fed is selling short-term securities and using the proceeds to buy long-term securities. Or, policy makers could take bolder action such as launching another large round of bond purchases if they become convinced of a significant slowdown.

Meanwhile, Jefferies David Zervos gives his take on the key levels to watch for more Fed action:

As always, it will be hard to pinpoint exact tipping points for a move – but I suspect that if we see a combination of the DXY (dollar index) at 86/88, and the spoo (S&P) at 1200/1225, the Fed will jump into action. I do not think we need to talk about the PCE or the U-rate when it comes to the Fed – the real triggers are in liquid market prices. And, in particular, if these levels in the DXY and spoo are breached, any sensible forecasts for forward looking employment and inflation that enter into a Taylor rule will plummet – hence accommodation follows!! In fact, take a look at a DXY chart since early 2008 – the 88 level was a good indicator for QE1 and QE2.