by Wolf Richter
Wolf Street
The Big Shift: Fed shifts to propping up consumption rather than asset prices.
There have been endless announcements by the Fed that they will add this and that to their asset-purchase programs. The media jumped all over these announcements, how the Fed is going to get into the junk bond market and ETFs with hundreds of billions of dollars. Each time, all kinds of hoopla broke out in the markets with stocks soaring and junk-bond ETFs soaring, and everything soaring – despite the worst economy in memory, despite 30 million people on unemployment insurance, and despite shocking earnings reports heading our way.