Fed’s “QE 2” Actions Will Likely Go Down As Financial Infamy

“QE 2” is radically different – and radically more dangerous – than the risky games that were played with earlier “quantitative easings”. This brief article is intended to warn readers about some of the key differences this time around. Words: 4405

So says Daniel R. Amerman, CFA (danielamerman.com) in an article* which Lorimer Wilson, editor of www.munKNEE.com, has reformatted into edited […] excerpts below for the sake of clarity and brevity to ensure a fast and easy read. (Please note that this paragraph must be included in any article re-posting to avoid copyright infringement.) Amerman goes on to say:

The Federal Reserve has announced that it will create approximately $600 billion of new money to fund US Treasury bond purchases which the media is referring to as “QE 2”, as in the second round of quantitative easing. The “2” in “QE 2” implies that this is something that has been done before. This implication is dead wrong because this time there appears to be no references to “sterilization” of the newly created money.  It’s likely good old-fashioned monetization in other words, with potentially quick and dire results. 

It is also essential to note that the Fed won’t be directly buying Treasury bonds from the US Treasury as a result of the most recent “QE 2” but will, instead, be intervening in the Treasury bond markets.  In other words, the Fed will be creating an artificial Treasury bond market, where it uses an unlimited amount of newly created public money to buy from private investment banks.

No Apparent “Sterilization” in Most Recent “QE 2”

The previous “QE” (which means exactly the same thing as directly creating vast sums of money out of thin air, but sounds more responsible) has been done by the Federal Reserve and European Central Bank in a manner which economists refer to as “sterilized”.  This concept is confusing to most people, and I do my best to explain the process in understandable terms in the three articles linked below.

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The Federal Reserve directly creates QE  money in whatever volume it feels like – no need for borrowing despite the common myth – through creating “excess reserve balances” and using that new QE money to pay banks for securities purchases, as explained in “Creating A Trillion From Thin Air.” (http://danielamerman.com/articles/Trillions.htm)

However, while a (desperate) central bank wants to be able to spend QE money without limits, letting that new QE money escape into the general money supply can lead to major inflation in a hurry.  So with the previous rounds, the Fed and ECB each used their “sterilization” powers to essentially put a corral up around the new QE money to keep it from escaping out into the economy, as described in “Containing Inflation Via Unlimited Monetary Creation.”  (http://danielamerman.com/articles/Containment.htm)

The “magic” process of “painlessly” creating trillions of dollars to bail politically connected banks out of their mistakes is far from free, and besides the enormous risks to the general population and to the value of their savings, such QE has the nasty side effect of effectively “hollowing out” the real economic basis underlying the banking system.  This is because the banks can’t really spend their “sterilized” money, but must have an ever larger share of their balance sheet assets consist of those economically meaningless excess reserve balances, as described in “The Fed’s Hollowing Out Of U.S. Banks”. (http://danielamerman.com/articles/Hollow.htm)

Now, when central banks create vast new sums of “sterilized” money, they are usually very, very careful to emphasize that the new QE money can’t escape into general circulation.  They do this to reassure the markets and their trading partners that their currency isn’t (they hope) about to implode in value in an inflationary meltdown.

I have carefully studied the Federal Reserve statement of November 3 that described the Treasury bond QE purchase program and Bernanke’s detailed October 15 speech about the upcoming “nonconventional” QE steps which the Fed would be taking… [and while] there were a number of phrases that could be interpreted in different ways there was no direct reference to the sterilization of these QE  funds. There were no promises that the QE funds would be kept out of the money supply[and, as such,]  I am profoundly skeptical that this lack of direct mention was some sort of omission. Instead, [I believe this latest QE has been introduced as] a powerful offensive weapon in a currency war.

Keep in mind, that this QE has always been a monetization designed to meet multiple purposes. The U.S.  is attempting to slash the value of the dollar compared to other world currencies in an effort to revive the failing U.S. economy. If this can be done without setting off a wide scale currency war, then U.S. jobs are helped in two ways, as 1) the weaker dollar means that U.S. exported goods become relatively cheaper and thus win more business overseas, even as 2) the weaker dollar removes the artificial advantage that China and other nations have had in exporting their goods into the U.S.. As Chinese and other imported goods rise in price, they would lose market share, with the sales going to U.S. based companies.  The eventual goal would be for U.S. workers producing U.S. goods to fill the shelves of Wal-Mart rather than China doing so (which also necessarily means these goods cost more than they do today as discussed at length in my recent article,  “Falling Dollar Means Rising Consumer Price Inflation”).

The threat that has successfully driven down the value of the U.S. dollar since September is now being used in practice. Despite the doublespeak official announcements that you may read in the papers, this is a communication between central banks, and everyone involved knows what’s going on. The U.S. is threatening inflation that will drive down the value of its currency, making other nations unwilling to hold dollars, and the lack of demand drops the value of the dollar relative to those nations’ currencies, with benefits passing through to U.S. companies that then hopefully revive the U.S. economy – albeit at a terrible cost to U.S. savers, and older Americans in general.

The New “QE 2” Is Spending Real Money

 In evaluating why this so-called “QE 2” is so different from the first rounds of QE, we need to understand that the use of the funds is quite different.  In the autumn of 2008 the Federal Reserve used the original round of QE to create artificial liabilities when there were no lenders, thereby keeping the highly leveraged banking system from collapsing. The QE money wasn’t actually being spent on anything you could reach out and touch; this was more about balance sheets and accounting manipulations on a massive scale.

During 2009 and early 2010, for the true second round of QE (which involved rolling the new dollars over from the first round of bank loans and creating substantially more new dollars), the Federal Reserve created an artificial mortgage market, so that mortgage interest rates would be lower than what a free market would have allowed, and thereby would hopefully help slow down or avert a collapse in the housing market. The new QE money was used to acquire financial instruments (mortgage securities), but “sterilization” meant that the newly createdQE  money would not be allowed to escape from the Federal Reserve’s and banks’ balance sheets. So again, the new QE  money wasn’t being used to buy or create anything you could actually reach out and touch. The mortgage money had already been lent by the bank, so the newly created Fed QE money didn’t go to the home purchasers.

What makes this current round night-and-day different is that the new QE money is being created to pay real people for real jobs and real tangible goods.  The United States government budget deficit is not about market values of financial instruments, but rather about paying workers on a massive scale for “stimulus”  projects. It’s about massive road reconstruction projects and expensive high-speed rail lines – with the QE money being given to workers to go out and spend, in return for their labor. It’s about paying a vast army of federal workers – who spend their paychecks.  The federal budget deficit is about massive transfers and redistributions of wealth within the U.S., including Social Security and Medicare, low income housing and many other purposes – all of which require real money that really gets spent by real people. This is about “stimulating” the economy, not sterilizing the hidden bailout funds.  “Stimulating” means the QE money reaches the economy.

In other words, this QE money goes directly into the general money supply at a rate of about $110 billion per month through at least June, (the money is the sum of the to-be-created QE $600 billion, and the cash flow from the Fed’s mortgage security portfolio that was purchased with created QE money).  This adds up to lots more newly created QE government dollars chasing the same goods and services, and competing with savings earned over a lifetime.  

There are about 111 million U.S. households, so $110 billion per month in government QE spending funded by direct monetary creation is equal to about $1,000 a month per household in new QE money that is competing with our salaries and savings – and another $1,000 in governmentQE  money the next month – and so forth.

Another way of looking at this is that with an annual economy of a little over $14 trillion, total private and government spending runs about $1.2 trillion per month.  Creating $110 billion a month in new QE money for the government to spend, means that about 9% of the economy will be purchased by newly created dollars.  So 9% of purchases in this new economy would be made by brand new QE dollars, competing with and just as good as yours and mine, being spent for whatever purposes the government desires.

Some commentators are already noting that the Fed’s QE  plan would buy about the same amount of US Treasury bonds as net new Federal borrowing, meaning the entire U.S. government budget deficit is being covered by the Federal Reserve’s manufacturing new QE money, month by month.  That is an interesting coincidence, isn’t it?  However, there is a much more fundamental “coincidence” at play here.  See my article “Soaring Government Spending ‘Crowds Out’ Private Investment Returns” for some very revealing graphs on the subject  (http://danielamerman.com/articles/Crowding.htm)

What the Federal Reserve is doing is directly creating QE money equal to 9% of the economy to artificially increase the government’s share of the economy by 9%.  It is artificial money for an artificial economy to avert collapse.  With again, the night and day difference between this monetization and previous “quantitative easing” being that this new QE money is going directly into the economy, and competing with your money and your savings.

The only way out, as the government may be belatedly realizing, is to grow the real U.S. economy but you can’t grow the real economy when the dollar is too high, because of currency manipulations by other countries causing  U.S. goods to become too expensive to export, even as domestic U.S. industries are destroyed by subsidized foreign competition.

To grow the real economy the value of the dollar must be slashed which, very conveniently, can be done through open QE monetization.  So, you create vast sums of QE money out of thin air to artificially fund the economy, hoping to string things out as long as possible.  Simultaneously, this very public QE monetization slashes the value of your currency, thereby stimulating real economic growth, which if you get really, really lucky, might grow the real economy fast enough to recover to a healthy level, and allow you to find an exit strategy from the insanely dangerous monetization policy before the value of the currency is annihilated. That’s the theory, anyway.

“QE 2” Is Not Undertaking Direct Purchases – Just Undertaking Open Manipulation

There is something else essential for investors and savers to understand about the QE 2 process which the Federal Reserve has just outlined. The Federal Reserve is not directly purchasing treasury bonds from the US government.  Instead, U.S. banks are purchasing the bonds from the US Treasury to fund the deficit, and then selling an equal amount of other bonds (likely at a nice profit) to the Federal Reserve. It would be reasonable to get annoyed at what appears to be the Fed’s paying banks additional money to do effectively nothing, but to do so would be to miss the real point of this arrangement and the real danger.

To understand, let’s explore what would happen if the Federal Reserve directly bought bonds from the Treasury (with appropriate legal changes if needed), but did not intervene in the Treasury bond markets. If there were a free bond market that was controlled by the self-interested investment decisions of private U.S. investors (the foreign central banks and investors having fled because of Federal Reserve actions), then these investors might look at the Fed directly monetizing and say “I don’t think I am being adequately compensated for my risk.” The next thing you know, Treasury bonds might be going for 10% yields, or 15%+ yields. With ripple effects almost instantly going out into all interest rates throughout the U.S. economy [and] that’s not what’s going to happen (or apparently not yet, anyway).

Instead, the Federal Reserve, with effectively unlimited QE money at its disposal (targets can always be changed), can intervene [with additional QE] at any time it wishes, in whatever volume it wishes, to make sure that Treasury bond and bill prices and yields are exactly what the Fed wants them to be. The U.S. Treasury bond market then becomes an artificial market, much like the U.S. mortgage market, with no connection to objective reality, and no discipline when it comes to the relationship between irresponsible government behavior and interest rates. The private investors in the market play along, and maybe even increase their investments, because they understand that their “counterparty” can create money at will, and therefore (from a short term and terribly flawed perspective) it may look like risk-free profits.  So long as they play along with the Fed. 

If bond traders go the other direction, and speculate against the Fed – the Fed crushes them with its control of the market.  In an openly and massively manipulated market, the governing factor is not theoretical fundamentals, but playing ball with the manipulator, and cooperating for your share of the rigged “profits”. What this means – for so long as this farce can hold together – is that there are no checks and balances on government spending, or on the share of the U.S. economy that is controlled by the U.S. government.

While this is a disaster scenario over the medium term over the short term it holds the game together for an increasingly desperate Federal Reserve and U.S. government. Treasury yields ripple throughout all borrowings, and it is this absolute control of treasury yields that allows the Federal Reserve to keep interest rates low regardless of real inflation levels, even as stimulus funds continue to flow in unlimited volume, and  regardless of what is happening with real wealth in the real U.S. economy.

If you are a native-born US citizen – there’s nothing “2” about this. We’ve never seen anything like this in our lifetimes [although] manyother nations have been here before – and watched the value of their currencies collapse.  The creation of “free” QE money that is so attractive to politicians for a brief period of time, becomes the most expensive possible way of funding government expenditures. Particularly for the savers, and especially the older savers, who see their life savings wiped out as a result of these grossly irresponsible actions.

What If The New “QE 2” Cash Is Sterilized?

The Fed has been deliberately vague about how exactly it will handle this latest QE program, which leaves open the possibility that the Fed could “sterilize” the new cash, or partially sterilize, or sterilize future purchases for future months. The problem with this approach, [however,] is that it effectively leads to the rapid systemic destruction of the economic basis of the U.S. banking system, and also worsens the situation in the private sector of the economy. As covered in my “Hollowing Out” article linked above, by the end of the Federal Reserve’s mortgage security purchase program (the previous “QE”), about 10% of the approximately $12 trillion in U.S. banking system assets consisted of sterilized money held at the Federal Reserve. The Federal Reserve is committed as a matter of policy to keeping this QE 2 money from escaping into general circulation – effectively preventing the bank from actually lending it out to a company for instance.

New QE monetary creation at a rate of approximately $110 billion per month is equal to a monthly volume of about 1% of total banking assets.  The announced QE program, if “sterilized”, would mean that by June, about 16% of total U.S. bank assets would consist of “sterilized money”, i.e. balances at the Federal Reserve that can’t be used anywhere else.

Another way of phrasing this is that the U.S. government budget deficit would be funded by essentially “taking” 1% of the assets of the U.S. banking system every month, and using that to cover the excess U.S. government spending.  How this works is that in the first month, the primary dealer banks would purchase $110 billion in newly issued Treasury bonds, and would sell $110 billion in already existing Treasury bonds to the Federal Reserve.  The Fed would pay for the bonds with money newly created on the spot – but because the money has been “sterilized”, the $110 billion in sale proceeds isn’t really spendable by the selling bank.  The actual Treasury bonds bought and sold are different.  It would be pure coincidence if the sector of the bond market whose prices and yields the Fed was most interested in manipulating that month were to match what the Treasury department was selling (and there is no need for dates or dollar amounts to precisely match up).

The following month, when the primary dealers purchase another $110 billion of newly issued Treasury securities to fund the Federal budget deficit, they don’t have access to the $110 billion from the previous month (**), so they have to take a new $110 billion out of their other assets to purchase the new bonds. They also make the sale of $110 billion of whatever already outstanding Treasury bonds the Fed is most interested in manipulating the price of that month, and the Fed pays them a nice price, but they have to leave the second $110 billion in sale proceeds at the Fed too (it’s not technically mandatory, but Bernanke is proud of the tools he uses to sterilize the cash, as covered in my “Containing Inflation Via Unlimited Money Creation” article). (**) If they did use the previous month’s Fed payment to buy new Treasury bonds, then it is a direct monetization scenario, not a sterilization scenario. So now the banking system is out $220 billion in terms of accessible cash, and when the third month’s $110 billion of Treasury bonds needs to be bought, that can’t come from the newly created Fed money either.  Which means another $110 billion has to come out of other assets of the U.S. banking system.

This rapid hollowing out of the U.S. banking system to fund a voracious and apparently never-ending federal deficit, where every month a greater share of banking assets becomes the debt of a bankrupt government, is obviously a dangerous strategy that grows more likely to blow up each month it is employed.  It also means that with each month, there are less banking assets available to be lent to businesses and consumers, which then makes economic recovery that much less likely.  In other words it would be an insane strategy for a government that is desperately trying to revive the private sector economy, which is one of the reasons I find further sterilization to be unlikely.

With the much more likely monetization scenario, the Fed purchases from the primary dealers $110 billion in whatever Treasury bonds it is most interested in manipulating the price of, in order to control interest rates.  The primary dealer banks take the $110 billion, which is non-restricted (as it isn’t sterilized) and buy $110 billion of that month’s new Treasury bond issuance.  Because the bank cash flow between buying and selling is a wash (except for their profits on each side), from a cash flow perspective this is the same as the Federal Reserve directly creating money to buy all newly issued Treasury bonds.  However, the advantage to doing it this way, as previously discussed, is that the Fed not only directly funds the deficit, but it takes direct control of the Treasury market, which more or less translates to direct control over most U.S. interest rates.

As for what the Fed is doing – Bernanke is effectively mumbling when it comes to the explanations. He’s being careful not to be clear, so he can claim to have his cake and eat it too (maintaining even a semblance of  plausible deniability is also very important in the diplomatic maneuverings accompanying the nascent currency war). As explained above, when the central bank creates vast sums of new QE money – and doesn’t explicitly say it is “sterilizing” – the odds are quite high that in fact, it is not sterilizing. Even if it is sterilizing, though, the results of this unprecedented monetary creation still lead to another disaster scenario.  Further sterilization accelerates the collapse of the private sector and banking system in real terms, which must then be covered by still more monetization.

It has to be one or the other: either newly created QE money is going directly into the economy in straight up monetization, or the assets of the U.S. banking system are being sucked out by the voracious Federal Government deficit at a very fast rate, leaving a hollow shell.  What the Fed is doing to the banks with sterilization is much like a spider consuming an insect:  punching a hole in the exoskeleton with its fangs and sucking the innards out, while the exoskeleton remains an intact but hollow shell.  (For those who would say the Fed would never do that to the banks that run it – the Fed has already been doing it, and don’t forget the crucial distinction between the interests of the banks and the personal financial interests of the senior executives who run the banks.)

Either about $1,000 a month per U.S. household is being created and spent in the economy in direct monetization, competing with your dollars and savings – or about $1,000 a month per U.S. household will be sucked out of the banking system by the government through sterilization, meaning less money for business and consumer lending, and an acceleration in the decline of the real economy.  The former in my opinion is the much more likely route, and represents a radical change, but either way, there is no such thing as “free money”, and the piper will be paid – by all of us.

Where to Find Refuge in a Post “QE 2” World

We have a good idea of the path ahead – which is the destruction of the value of the U.S. dollar, as well as the impoverishment of a good part of the population. By far, the heaviest punishment will fall on the older members of the population whose savings are destroyed, and who do not have the remaining years to recapture what they have lost.

There are solutions, however, and not everyone will see their savings destroyed. By taking the right series of steps, assets can be preserved – or even expanded, even in after-inflation and after-tax terms. The difference between being destroyed, and saving your assets, quite simply comes down to a matter of making informed decisions.  It is a matter of education, in other words.

A good starting step is to read and understand the three articles linked earlier in this article which cover the essentials of direct monetary creation, sterilization, and hollowing out the banking system. I’ve done my very best to make these articles understandable, and from the feedback which I received at the time they were published, these articles provide valuable new insights into what is really happening and what the central banks have really been doing.

When it comes time for action, the simple and increasingly popular solution is to pull all you can out of paper investments and symbolic currencies, put them in gold, and hunker down to survive the storm that is building in strength by the week but such  a simple solution of just buying gold leaves you handing a good chunk, or perhaps most of your starting net worth, over to the government by the time all is said and done. The way the government – under existing laws – effectively confiscates the wealth of gold investors in a highly inflationary environment is little understood by most gold investors, but should form the central point for their investment strategies as illustrated in step-by-step, easy to understand – but irrefutable – detail in the article “Hidden Gold Taxes:  The Secret Weapon Of Bankrupt Governments” (http://danielamerman.com/articles/GoldTaxes1.htm).

Let me suggest an alternative approach, which is to study, learn and reposition.  To have a chance, you must learn not just how wealth will redistribute, but how unfair government tax policies (that can be relied upon to increase in unfairness) will cripple most simple methods of attempting to survive inflation. Buying gold (and perhaps a lot of it) can be one key component of a portfolio approach [but it is important to] use multiple components, each doing what they do best; to shift the components in a dynamic strategy over time; to  position yourself so that wealth will be redistributed to you in a manner that reverses the effects of government tax policy so that instead of paying real taxes on illusionary income, you’re paying illusory taxes on real income and the higher the rate of inflation and the more outrageous the government actions – the more your after-inflation and after-tax net worth grows.

*http://danielamerman.com/articles/Monetize1.htm