US Economic Policy

Discussion in 'Politics' started by Yannis, May 4, 2011.

  1. Yannis

    Yannis

    Greenspan: 'There is No Evidence' Fed Tactics Have Helped Economy
    By Forrest Jones


    The Federal Reserve's recent quantitative easing program, a $600 billion bond buyback program designed to stimulate the economy and the latest in a series of similar assets purchases, really didn't help the economy that much, says former Fed Chairman Alan Greenspan.

    Easing did weaken the dollar somewhat, which was good for U.S. exports.

    "There is no evidence that huge inflow of money into the system basically worked," Greenspan tells CNBC.

    "It obviously had some effect on the exchange rate and the exchange rate was a critical issue in export expansion."

    "Aside from that, I am ill-aware of anything that really worked. Not only QE2 but QE1."

    QE2 is the popular abbreviation for the $600 billion bond buyback program, while QE1, the first round easing, involved the Fed's purchase of mortgage-backed securities and other assets, both of which ended up swelling the Federal Reserve's balance sheet by trillions of dollars.

    The programs were designed to pump banks full of money so they would facilitate stock-market gains, lending and ultimately job creation.
    Greenspan said he "would be surprised if there was a QE3" because it would "continue erosion of the dollar."

    Some current Federal Reserve officials have expressed concern with the size of such asset purchases especially at a time of near-zero interest rates.

    Bubbles can form.

    "An extended zero-interest rate policy is producing new sources of fragility that we need to be aware of," says Kansas City Federal Reserve Bank President Thomas Hoenig, according to Reuters.
    "Monetary policy is not a tool that can solve every problem."

    In fact, interest rates need to eventually climb, says Hoenig, one of the Fed's more hawkish board members.

    "The longer we leave interest rates at zero, the more asset values will be defined by these low rates and the greater the negative impact will be once the inevitable move up in rates begins."

    Some say quantitative easing was a mistake.

    Buying back assets involves printing money, which weakens the dollar and pumps up inflation rates.

    Furthermore, a lot of that fresh money shooting off the Fed's printing presses has gone abroad and disrupted exchange rates, pumped up food and other commodity prices while doing nothing to create jobs back home in the U.S.

    "If you come at it from the point of view that you think deflation risk was significant last summer and you want to avoid that, QE2 was a success," says Michael Gapen, senior U.S. economist at Barclays Capital, according to the Washington Post.

    "If you look at it from the point of view that you wanted to make the recovery stronger and more durable, you would have a lingering bad taste in your mouth."

    Others weren't so diplomatic.

    "QE2 was a terrible mistake, and I think it has been counterproductive for economic growth," says John Ryding, chief economist of RDQ Economics, according to the AFP newswire.

    "It has gotten inflation up, and that has squeezed the people most in need of paying off their debts."
     
    #41     Jul 1, 2011
  2. as678

    as678

    Completely agree. As the video says "The Bernank" really shouldn't do a QE 3.
     
    #42     Jul 1, 2011
  3. Lucrum

    Lucrum

    This was (supposedly) in the Waco Tribune Herald, Waco , TX Nov 18, 2010

    Put me in charge . . .

    Put me in charge of food stamps. I'd get rid of Lone Star cards; no cash for Ding Dongs or Ho Ho's, just money for 50-pound bags of rice and beans, blocks of cheese and all the powdered milk you can haul away. If you want steak and frozen pizza, then get a job.

    Put me in charge of Medicaid. The first thing I'd do is to get women
    Norplant birth control implants or tubal ligations. Then, we'll test
    recipients for drugs, alcohol, and nicotine and document all tattoos and piercings. If you want to reproduce or use drugs, alcohol, smoke or get tats and piercings, then get a job.

    Put me in charge of government housing. Ever live in a military barracks? You will maintain our property in a clean and good state of repair. Your "home" will be subject to inspections anytime and possessions will be inventoried. If you want a plasma TV or Xbox 360, then get a job and your own place.

    In addition, you will either present a check stub from a job each week or you will report to a "government" job. It may be cleaning the roadways of trash, painting and repairing public housing, whatever we find for you. We will sell your 22 inch rims and low profile tires and your blasting stereo and speakers and put that money toward the “common good.”

    Before you write that I've violated someone's rights, realize that all of
    the above is voluntary. If you want our money, accept our rules.. Before you say that this would be "demeaning" and ruin their "self esteem," consider that it wasn't that long ago that taking someone else's money for doing absolutely nothing was demeaning and lowered self esteem.

    If we are expected to pay for other people's mistakes we should at least attempt to make them learn from their bad choices. The current system rewards them for continuing to make bad choices.

    AND While you are on Gov’t subsistence, you no longer can VOTE! Yes that is correct. For you to vote would be a conflict of interest. You will voluntarily remove yourself from voting while you are receiving a Gov’t welfare check. If you want to vote, then get a job.
     
    #43     Jul 2, 2011
  4. Ditto!
     
    #44     Jul 2, 2011
  5. Eight

    Eight

    Socialism only works where it's subsidized. European countries have little military budgets and when they are rich in Oil their socialism works... The US imports oil and has a huge military budget but Democrats and Republicans keep expanding the government's role in all directions.

    Something is wrong with that picture... not sure what.... oh wait, I see it now, it's the part about how the US will never be able to pay for all the stuff they promised...

    The new scenario is like what happens when there is the last cookie situation in a shitty household: it gets ugly, the one with the most power gets the cookie and the weaker ones cry...

    So the real question is how will this fight pan out? I'm pretty sure that the strong will get their disproportionate share. That means that children, the elderly, the sick/lame/lazy will get less and less and it could get really bad for many of them. They could actually be starving and dying needlessly at some point in the future...
     
    #45     Jul 2, 2011
  6. Brilliant! I've also long argued that final point. Voting should be an earned right and those that subsist of government transfer payments should not be afforded the right to vote (as they will always vote for a continuation of welfare).
     
    #46     Jul 2, 2011
  7. Now, NOT doing this is "stealing from the poor." The parasite class has gotten out of control which is one of many reasons why the handouts need to stop.
     
    #47     Jul 3, 2011
  8. Yannis

    Yannis

    A Litany of Obama Adminstration Failures
    By Christopher G. Adamo


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    "By now everybody who regularly receives e-mail "forwards" has seen the one showing Barack Obama ostensibly standing in front of a devastated landscape that clearly is meant to represent the United States under his stewardship. The caption reads, “My work here is done.” Accusations of partisanship and racism aside, the message conveyed is so profound because it succinctly reflects the determined efforts of the Obama White House to radically change America over the past two and a half years.

    The Standard and Poors downgrade of America’s credit rating during this past week, and the market upheaval that has followed are certainly not the first financial fiascos fomented and overseen by the current administration. Unfortunately, they are not likely to be the last. Nor has the country fared any better in other areas, whether on the diplomatic front, the culture war, or in regards to America’s dwindling technical prowess.

    So fast and furious have been the concerted assaults on the institutions and foundations of the nation that the erosion and destruction is no longer easy to assess from the perspective of individual events. Rather, in retrospect it now appears more as a grim and depressing blur of havoc inflicted continually on the nation in the past thirty-two months, with little immediate relief in sight. Nevertheless, some (but certainly not all) of the more reprehensible milestones need to be revisited, in order to maintain a proper evaluation of this administration and the danger it continues to pose with each passing day.

    The financial upheaval of the past week is only a snapshot of efforts, begun even before Obama’s inauguration, to radically transform the nation’s economy from one of free markets and individual initiative to a collectivist autocracy in which the resources of the people are controlled and dispersed by the ruling elite. The recent anxieties experienced by everyone from professional market watchers to average citizens on Mainstreet are fully warranted. If this administration is able to achieve its ultimate goals, the former means of pursuing individual livelihoods and exercising freedoms will be soon eradicated, and the nation’s place on the world stage ultimately eliminated.

    From the first days of the Obama White House, an anti-capitalist, anti-western agenda was clearly being implemented. Among Obama’s first acts after being inaugurated was the removal of a statue of Winston Churchill (a gift to America by the government of Great Britain) from the Oval Office. But the item was not merely relegated to some lesser location. It was sent back to the British government as an obvious insult against a staunch and reliable ally.

    Following on the heels of that childish and petty act were a series of groveling visitations before foreign leaders who harbor unrestrained hostility towards America. At the expense of the nation and its reputation, Obama did his best to elevate himself above former U.S. policy and actions, on which he repeatedly laid blame for any simmering resentment among America’s enemies. Muslim despots and South American Marxists could count on warm embraces and adulation from him, while he repeatedly expressed scorn for this nation in their presence.

    Meanwhile, he very proudly dismantled the nuclear shield that America had been establishing over Eastern Europe, thus leaving the entire region vulnerable to attacks from rogue middle-eastern nations and conceivably susceptible to the lingering musings of Russian expansionists. With cold deliberation, he took a situation that had been quietly moving towards stability and security, and shredded the protections it offered to potential allies. Meanwhile, amid empty platitudes and reassurances from his cabinet that America’s new outreach would garner stable and devoted friends in the Muslim world, the Iranians have stepped up their efforts to build both nuclear weapons and the missile technology needed to deliver them.
    It is a sad testament that, on July 21, the final landing of the Space Shuttle Atlantis at Cape Canaveral Florida signaled not only the end of that program, but the dismantling of America’s ability to even put a human being into orbit. Having cancelled the Constellation program, which was planned both as a successor to the Shuttle as well as a stepping-stone towards renewed American exploration of the moon and beyond, Obama decried it as excessively expensive and unnecessary. In this he reflected the attitudes of American leftists during the 1960s, who castigated the nation over the cost and aggressiveness of the Apollo program which, in a defining battle front of the “Cold War,” achieved President Kennedy’s goal of landing a man on the moon before the end of that decade.

    According to the liberal socialists of that time, that money could have been better spent back here on earth by handing it out in various social/welfare programs. Clearly, Barack Obama stands in agreement with them, having squandered $787 billion with the single stroke of his pen on February 18, 2009 when he signed his bogusly titled “Stimulus” giveaway. That incomprehensible sum was more than thirty times the cost of getting Armstrong and Aldrin to the moon’s surface. Yet now, barely two years later, the nation has absolutely nothing to show for that enormous raid on the nation’s coffers.

    Elsewhere, Attorney General Eric Holder, Obama’s minion at the Department of Justice, saw to it that the nation’s top law-enforcement agency was henceforth mutated into a thoroughly politicized tool of the left. Most notably, by refusing to prosecute members of the “New Black Panthers” who interfered with voting in the 2008 elections, Holder has since made it clear on numerous occasions that, under his watch, the ultimate purpose of that organization is to advance the liberal agenda. Selective enforcement of “justice,” based on the political ideology of those in question, is no justice at all. But it is par for the course for the current White House.

    While no discussion of the horrendous damage done to America by Obama and his cronies would be complete without mention of their crowning affront to the nation known as Obamacare, space does not allow a thorough examination of the manifold threats it poses. Nor can anything less than an entire volume be properly devoted to the many affronts to the Constitution in both its passage by a corrupt congress and the manner in which it is intended to be implemented.

    Suffice to say that the devastation to the nation is real and ongoing. If America is to avoid the slippery slope facing it on so many fronts or, the catastrophic end game the current situation portends, at the next election, the government must be expunged of both this current administration and any remnant of the mindset that has enabled its abhorrent actions."

    :(
     
    #48     Aug 12, 2011
  9. Ricter

    Ricter

    False attribution.
     
    #49     Aug 12, 2011
  10. Yannis

    Yannis