Quote from: B.A.S. on January 27, 2015, 01:06:00 PM

The poor enjoy QE as well as banks. By the poor, I mean people obsessed with buying shit they don't need with money they don't have.

Banks enjoy it because they can now lend money at better rates to people who don't need that money in the first place. Lower interest rates allow the poor to stay poor (by buying extra shit) and the rich to get richer (taking enormous loans at low rates to facilitate greater business opportunities cheap credit allows). It hurts everyone depending on the way you look at it.

In fact, the QE programme will not cause direct inflation because:

- the interest rates are already near zero. What you say about making lending easier is when the FED could still lower interest rates, but that's already near zero, so that trick doesn't work anymore. That's why they resorted to QE in the first place: QE is something you do when the "normal" Keynesian lever arm of interest rates is already near zero. Also called a liquidity trap. Usually, lowering interest rates makes people lend more (and spend more according to Keynes). But when the rates are near-zero, that lever is pushed to its maximum.

QE is buying up stuff from financial markets against freshy issued base money.

The only thing it does in the first place, is to pump up the prices of the things that are bought by the fed (by increasing the demand for it, whatever type of securities it are). If you hold these things, you get the seigniorage of that printing. Usually banks and rich people.

However, the last few years, QE has been going together with a requirement for higher fractional reserves (Baal III act). Higher fractional reserves lowers the amount of Bank money. As such, most of this QE money will never really "hit the market" but remain as reserves at the FED. As such, what the FED *actually* does is to accept certain securities from banks as "bank reserves" and converts them into dollars kept at the FED. So what happens NET is that certain securities have been taken out by the FED, increasing their market price and making rich the people who owned them before the QE (because their market price increased).

The printing of base money has largely been offset by the increasing requirement for fractional reserves.

I wouldn't even been surprised if this was not a way for the FED to have certain banks with bad paper to let them get rid of that paper by selling it to the FED, but I have to say that I don't know this.