Tag Archives: Quantitative tightening

How Quantitative Tightening Ends, by MN Gordon

When the pain level gets too high, QT4 will end the same way QT’s 1, 2, and 3 ended—with a quick reversal by the Fed and the initiation of another massive QE. From MN Gordon at economicprism.com:

The pursuit of decadence is always met with the painful reality that stopping the excess is much more difficult than starting.  This realization, like a killer in the night, lies in wait until just after the point of no return.  When the certain destruction cannot be undone.

John Maynard Keynes, Fabian socialist and the godfather of modern day economic planning, in his 1935 work, The General Theory of Employment, Interest and Money, wrote:

“Practical men, who believe themselves to be quite exempt from any intellectual influence, are usually the slaves of some defunct economist.”

In late November 2008, then Federal Reserve Chairman Ben Bernanke committed a fait accompli.  Though he may not have realized it at the time; he was blinded by his scholarly prejudices.

Bernanke, a smug Great Depression history buff of the highest academic pedigree, gazed back 80-years, observed several credit market parallels, and then made a preconceived diagnosis.

After that, he picked up his desktop copy of A Monetary History of the United States, by Milton Friedman and Anna Schwartrz, turned to the chapter on the Great Depression, and got to work inflating the money supply.

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Markets Suddenly Hear Hawkish Fed: Stocks Sag, ARKK Plunges, Yields Jump, Cryptos (the New Hedge Against Inflation) Fail to Hedge, Plunge in Sync, by Wolf Richter

The air is coming out of the balloon. From Wolf Richter at wolfstreet.com:

Quantitative Tightening coming sooner, faster, and bigger, according to the Fed’s minutes today.

Markets were blissfully asleep late last year, and particularly in December, when the Fed became hawkish and made clear that it would move much faster than previously expected, and that there would be more rate hikes sooner, and that the balance sheet runoff – Quantitative Tightening – was already being discussed. And Powell came out after the FOMC meeting on December 15 and said that inflation was now a “big threat.”

And I came out and said at the time that this most reckless Fed ever – still repressing interest rates to near 0% and still printing money hand over fist, though at a slower rate – was “starting to get serious” about inflation. Upon which the markets laughed.

And today, we got the minutes from that meeting, and suddenly it sank in for the markets that the Fed, after brushing off inflation for a year, is getting serious about inflation.

The terms “elevated levels of inflation,” “elevated inflation,” and “elevated inflation pressures” were mentioned five times in the minutes.

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