Wednesday, March 18, 2009

Holy FOMC, part deux - bad news

When the Fed says they're gonna buy everything and anything in sight - from MBSs to Treasuries to Agencies to your goldfish farm - look out below! Where, pray tell, will all the $$$ for this come from? And why is the stock market 'rallying'. And why is Maria Bartiromo panting about 'optimism' and 'momentum'?

Well, the money's coming from future generations of us dupes (ooooops, Americans), via super-high interest rates and a collapsing dollar: eg everything you might want to buy in the next 2-30 years will be massively more expensive, and everything you might want to invest in will be wiped out by inflation.

Fun

While I've long argued for a massive governmental response to this crisis, and while the apparently monumental actions by the Fed today are gonna help things in the short term, today's machinations are at best a stop-gap. Had the Feds, rather, announced the immediate nationalization of all the largest 150 US banks, the 'markets' would have been apoplectic, but the root cause of this disaster would be closer to being solved...

We still have a fundamental and systemic crisis of the banking system, and Fed balance sheet inflation does absolutely nothing to address this

Triage to keep the patient alive, as done today, is yet another seemingly-dramatic-but-way-too-weak response to the crisis

Consider today's news to be very bad in the long run

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