2010-12-16

Fed says they will keeping on printing, irrelevant of the economy

The Fed has been created to print money. Bernanke has been spending is entire life studying that fine art of printing money, and has dedicated his life on how to print as effectively and massively as possible. Our beloved Nobel laureate, Paul Krugman still keeps on blogging and writing op-eds in the NYT about how much more we need to print and how disappointing Bernanke's printing capabilities are.

Given these facts, one should be surprised to hear the Fed state that they will keep on printing, no matter happens: Bernanke will always find a good reason to print.
Dec. 15 (Bloomberg) -- Federal Reserve policy makers indicated that signs of economic strength won’t deter them from pumping money into the financial system so long as unemployment remains elevated.

The Federal Open Market Committee said yesterday after its final meeting of 2010 that growth is “insufficient to bring down unemployment” and inflation has “continued to trend lower.” U.S. central bankers affirmed a plan to buy $600 billion of bonds through June and renewed their pledge for an “extended period” of low interest rates.
[...]
The Fed statement should “guide market participants to focusing on the unemployment rate as the relevant measure for whether the economy is picking up fast enough,” said Dean Maki, chief U.S. economist at Barclays Capital in New York. “The economic data have clearly been improving and the Fed could have sounded much more upbeat than it did.”
[...]
Republican lawmakers, including Indiana Representative Mike Pence and Tennessee Senator Bob Corker, want to jettison the half of the Fed’s legislative mandate that focuses on maximum employment so as to concentrate on stable prices alone. Texas Representative Ron Paul, author of the book “End the Fed,” is set to chair a subcommittee that oversees the Fed next year.
Hopefully, they will succeed in reigning in the Fed.
With the greater political pressure, “there’s going to be a lot more noise and controversy around the Fed’s policies,” said Julia Coronado, chief economist for North America at BNP Paribas in New York.

“This is Chairman Bernanke’s Volcker moment, when he may have to engage in policies that are unpopular but what he thinks he needs to do for the good of the economy,” she said. Paul Volcker, Fed chairman from 1979 to 1987, increased interest rates to as high as 20 percent to tame an annual inflation rate approaching 15 percent.
Julia Coronado is a fool. Bernanke is no Volcker, and keeping the interest rates at 0% doesn't require ny courage from a Central Banker. The opposite only is true.

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