Tag Archives: Quantitative Easing

In the years following the global financial crisis, the world’s leading economies have found relief through aggressive monetary policy. But with interest rates slashed to historic lows and central bank balance sheets significantly larger as a percent of GDP than they were before the financial crisis, policymakers will need alternatives to interest rate cuts and conventional quantitative easing when the next recession comes along. U.S. central bankers have cut real interest rates between...

Werner’s main points: The “EU Movement” has been created by the US Government and their secret services in order centralise their influence over Europe. Big business, banks, central banks and the IMF want to excercise their power through unelected officials. The free trade area with the EU is beneficial and will surely be maintained, even in the Brexit case. The election outcome is not so clear as it seems to the...

Authored by Steve H. Hanke of the Johns Hopkins University. Follow him on Twitter @Steve_Hanke. Reportage in The Wall Street Journal on April 4th states that “A fund owned by China’s foreign-exchange regulator has been taking stakes in some of the country’s biggest banks, raising speculation that it may be a new member of the so-called ‘national team’ of investors the Chinese government unleashes to support its stock market.” Statists and interventionists around the world (read: `those who...

In his blog, Ben Bernanke discusses the merits of longer-term interest rate targeting as a monetary policy tool. A lot would depend on the credibility of the Fed’s announcement. If investors do not believe that the Fed will be successful at pushing down the two-year rate … they will immediately sell their securities of two years’ maturity or less to the Fed. … the Fed could end up owning most or all of the eligible securities, with uncertain consequences for interest rates overall. On the...

In this post, we provide a rough assessment of the reflationary impact of the newly-announced ECB’s measures through a simple framework. Ahead of the December 2015 meeting, we used a simple method based on the ECB’s leaked models in the German press in order to guestimate the impact of QE on inflation, and thus the potential for additional easing based on the ECB’s own forecasts. We use the same framework to assess the potential macro impact of the new measures announced by the ECB last...

The ECB announced measures that exceeded expectations, targeting the refi rate, its monthly asset purchases, a new corporate bonds purchase programme, new TLTROs and a negative rate. The deposit rate was cut as expected, but Draghi said that “no more cuts” were anticipated at this stage. The ECB’s Governing Council delivered a comprehensive policy package that exceeded market expectations by a large margin. The 10bp deposit rate cut to -0.40% was expected but other measures were not,...

In the old days, before the world was awash in capital with nowhere to go, an announcement of monetary easing was generally considered a good thing, a sign that central bankers were on the job. Historically, in all but the most extreme circumstances, lower interest rates have tended to spur economic activity, with the contemporaneous effect of supporting risky assets. But we are clearly living in an extreme circumstance, and after eight years of such announcements from central banks, it’s...

Comme pour l’alcool, l’abus de QE est dangereux pour l’économie! Pour être honnête, je ne m’attendais pas à une si belle première séance en 2016 : DAX – 4,28 %, CAC – 2,5 %, Nikkei – 3 %, Chine – 7 %, S&P -1,53 % ; mais, contrairement à nombre de mes confrères, je n’en suis pas surpris. J’ai donné à plusieurs reprises en fin d’année mon scenario pour 2016 et force est de constater que les baisses du premier jour de l’année y trouvent bien leur place. Depuis plusieurs mois, les marchés...