Fed Gives Stronger Signals of Action says this in part:
"The U.S. Federal Reserve signaled more strongly it will take new steps as needed to boost the economy, but held back from immediately starting a new round of bond buying or taking other actions on Wednesday.
"The committee will closely monitor incoming information on economic and financial developments and will provide additional accommodation as needed to promote a stronger economic recovery and sustained improvement in labor market conditions in a context of price stability," the central bank said in a statement issued at the end of the Federal Open Market Committee's two-day policy meeting.
Fed officials have already downgraded their economic forecasts this year and they sounded fresh notes of concern in Wednesday's statement.
The central bank noted that economic activity had "decelerated somewhat over the first half of this year." That's a shift from their assessment in June that the economy had been expanding moderately this year."
Now that we know the Fed wants to help, let's ask ourselves just what they can do.
The Music Men is a takeoff on the old movie musical "The Music Man" about a con man who goes to a small Iowa town named River City, scams the townsfolk into parting with their money and then skips town with the cash.
Here's part of the editorial:
"As the financial world breathlessly awaits word this week from the Federal Reserve and European Central Bank, we can't help but think of "The Music Man." In that classic if now dated musical, the residents of an Iowa town are gulled by a huckster selling band equipment. They desperately want to believe in his power to solve their town's delinquency problems, until they discover Harold Hill can't play a note.
Central bankers are today's music men, the maestros we desperately want to believe can rescue the world economy by playing one more monetary tune. Buy more bonds and lift the stock market! cry the boys at Pimco and Goldman. Pay less for bank reserves! shout the Princeton professors. Promise to keep rates at near-zero until 2015—or 2016 or 2017—beg the politicians.
And so Mario Draghi and Ben Bernanke will try to sell us 76 more trombones. Sooner or later we'll discover that their money illusion can't save an economy from its more fundamental problems, and that they may even be interfering with the faster growth they want.
In the case of the Fed, the evidence is already clear that Mr. Bernanke's extraordinary ministrations are producing less and less bang for the buck. . . . QE1, or the first bout of bond-buying, took place at the trough of recession and no doubt contributed to the recovery. With the velocity of money falling amid the panic, monetary policy had a clear role to play.
In most business cycles, the Fed then retreats from its monetary easing as the economy recovers. In this case, even as growth returned to an annual rate of 2.4% in 2010, the Fed kept pouring it on.
Yet each successive intervention has yielded diminishing economic returns. QE2, launched in September 2010, did lift stock market prices for several months. But it also lifted other asset prices, such as oil and commodities, while sending dollar liquidity into emerging markets that produced property and inflation spikes.
The commodity bubble raised the cost of food and energy and dampened the very growth that the Fed was hoping to spur. Countries on the periphery of the dollar bloc had to tighten their monetary policy.
Far from accelerating, growth slowed within the year. . . .
Meanwhile, the costs of all this have been considerable, and are under-appreciated. Near-zero interest rates have punished savers and retirees. The inflation breakout that some predicted hasn't materialized, but the commodity bubble has reduced the growth of real middle-class incomes. With its bond buying, the Fed has supplanted the private market as a price setter and made the long bond useless as a price signal.
Above all, near-zero interest rates have disguised the cost of the government's fiscal mismanagement. By keeping the Treasury's borrowing costs artificially low, the Fed has reduced the urgency to cut spending and guaranteed an explosion in financing costs when interest rates do inevitably rise. Good luck to the future President who has to re-finance $1 trillion to $2 trillion in debt issuance at 6%.
To put it another way, far from contributing to growth, the Fed has become part of the problem. . . . The Fed's policies have benefited government at the expense of the private economy. No wonder growth is lackluster.
This is not to suggest that Mr. Bernanke and his fellow music men are deliberately trying to con the public. They really are trying to conjure faster growth. The fundamental mistake is everyone else's for putting so much faith in the magical powers of central bankers. The residents of River City were fooled by Harold Hill because they wanted to be."
Summing Up
The Fed can't solve our economic or fiscal problems.
Only tax and fiscal policy can do that, coupled with private sector initiatives which will create economic growth.
Unfortunately, too few of We the People are aware of this simple truth, at least at this time.
As time goes on, however, the conclusion will become inescapable. Increasing the money supply doesn't produce anything except more money. No thing.
The Fed, unlike con man Harold Hill in "The Music Man," isn't trying to fleece anyone. They just are playing the fiddle that they have to play. It's strictly noise to the real economy.
Unless and until We the People get that and cause our feckless politicians to address taxes and government spending and private sector initiatives (Keystone pipeline and other energy development, for example), the economy will remain in a stall speed mode.
And as our U.S. economy continues to muddle through, the rest of the world's economies will suffer even more. We in the U.S. are the consumer spending engine that must perform for one simple fact. As the world's largest economy by far, U.S. consumer spending accounts for two thirds of our GDP.
When our consumer spending suffers, as now, the rest of the world's economies suffer even more. That's because they don't have enough export business to ship to us.
High unemployment is the rule almost everywhere these days, and our Fed is helpless to do much of anything about it. It's out of bullets.
We're in a worldwide slowdown, if not recession, and one in which Ben Bernanke and the other music men at the Fed playing their 76 trombones can't bring to an end.
Thanks. Bob.
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