From Bob McTeer's Economic Policy Blog:
As I listen to commentary on cable TV about the Fed’s quantitative easing, I find it amazing that people smarter than I, as well as better trained and more knowledgeable about many things, keep making the same mistake they have made for the past three or four years. Their predictions of an inflationary break-out and/or a collapse of the dollar haven’t come true during this time, but instead of going back and reviewing their assumptions, they merely say it is bound to happen even though it hasn’t happened yet.Tip d'Chapeau to, and extended excerpts from, Jesse's Café Américain:
What they fail to grasp is that their initial assumption that the Fed is printing boatloads of money simply isn’t true. If it were true, I would join them in their dire predictions. But it simply isn’t true and hasn’t been true throughout this period. The latest estimates from the Fed’s H.6 Money Stock Measures show M2 growth actually declining since the Fed resumed significant asset purchases last fall. M2 growth in the three months ending in February was 4.6 percent; it was 6.5 percent in the previous six months and 6.8 percent over the previous 12 months. Even this moderate growth is muted by the average decline in M2 velocity of around 3 ½ percent in recent years, yielding a growth rate of nominal GDP of roughly 4 percent per year....MORE
The Fed Is Printing Money, But Where Is It Going? They Know But Will Not Say
[Robert McTeer] worked for the Federal Reserve for 36 years, including as president of the Federal Reserve Bank of Dallas from 1991–2005, where he was known for his plain, jargon-free public speaking and telling stories about growing up in rural Georgia. He has stated that one of his goals was "to translate economic sense into common sense".Bob McTeer says with the provocative headline that The Fed Has Not Been Printing Boatloads of Money. As you may recall, Mr. McTeer was a member of the Federal Reserve for 36 years
As a member of the Federal Open Market Committee on the Federal Reserve, he was considered "dovish" on inflation and was one of the most consistent opponents of raising the federal funds rate in the late 1990s. He has stated that he does not believe in the NAIRU and Phillips curve.
"What they fail to grasp is that their initial assumption that the Fed is printing boatloads of money simply isn’t true."And yet one can look at the Fed's Adjusted Monetary Base, one of the few measures of money over which the Fed has a more direct measure of control, and we see this
Although those who follow money already know it, the Fed is printing money but that money is going directly to the banks through their methods of purchasing assets from them, both Treasuries and Mortgage debt (which may be of dodgy pedigree).
We see that here in the expansion of Excess Reserves of the Banks
But Bob McTeer knows Banking, and he knows where most of that QE money has been going.
"Asset purchases by the Fed normally lead to a multiple expansion of money since, at the margin, reserve requirements are only about 10 percent of deposits. The roughly $2 trillion of asset growth from before the financial crisis through QE2 was largely offset, however, by an expansion in excess bank reserves of $1.6 trillion. In other words, the banking system has been sterilizing or neutralizing the impact of the asset purchases on the money supply."And he knows that this is a form of 'trickle down' approach, and is not stimulating the commercial economy. But it is helping to prop up a banking sector that has never really taken its losses by writing down bad debts, cutting salaries and jobs, and downsizing to a more historical size relative to the real economy....MUCH MORE
