The Fed’s Legacy: Asset Bubbles and Lost Confidence

by James Rickards
Daily Reckoning

For most experts, failure is a learning experience that leads to a search for new methods. That’s not true for central bankers. When their policies fail, they try more of the same in the vain hope that quantity will make up for the lack of quality in their ideas.

In the past seven years, major central banks have created over $15 trillion of new money, mostly through purchases of government bonds.

These money printing and bond purchase programs have been called QE1, QE2 and QE3 in the U.S., Euro-QE in Europe and QQE (quantitative and qualitative easing) in Japan.

All of these programs and exotic variations such as “Operation Twist” have failed to achieve self-sustaining growth anywhere near former trends, and have failed to achieve the 2% inflation targets of those central banks.

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