Submitted by Tyler Durden on 04/18/2016 12:40 -0400
Former Federal Reserve Chairman Alan Greenspan admitted in an interview with Sara Eisen that quantitative easing did what it was supposed to do, which was to inflate stock prices and drive multiple expansion.
He was confused as to why things such as corporate earnings, capital spending, and productivity have declined given how much QE was pumped into the system. The answer to the riddle of course, is that QE was never intended to help fix anything fundamentally, it was as Kyle Bass said recently, simply a mechanism to transfer wealth and make the rich richer.
“Monetary policy has done everything it can, unless you want to put additional QEs on and QEs on, they’re not helping that much.
What ultimately determines whether or not you’re getting an effect from the QEs are what has happened to the price/earnings ratio, and that obviously has done what you’d expect it to do.
You bring long-term rates down, and the price/earnings ratios in the equity markets go up, which is exactly what they planned to do and it’s happened that way.“
All of this is precisely what we’ve been saying all along, which is that QE has always been about one thing, and that is to take wealth from many (savers), and transfer it to a select few (asset owners).
Until, suddenly . . . .*POP*
i am unable to express what I think of Greenspan and his
opinions on an internet forum.
Y’know, it’s hard to guess how old Alan Greenspan is. His ol’ head looks like it’s done wore out 4 or 5 bodies.
Step 1: Pound several hundred nails into a wooden barrel.
Step 2: Put Mr. Greenspan inside the barrel.
Step 3: Drag the barrel behind a horse along a cobblestone street.
Repeat as necessary for Bernanke, Yellen, Blankfein, Dimon, et al.
The whole idea was and is to buy our way out of a deflationary depression, and damn the consequences. And it looks like we are within spitting distance of doing just that, to my astonishment.
For their next trick, TPTB seem hell-bent on controlling the economic train despite being unwilling or unable to use the brakes, if any of the brakes are still functional — should be quite a…crash?…boom? Something else?
Enquiring minds are watching with great fascination!