You should have seen this Xtranormal video by now. If not, here it is.
Hilarious. But a more serious take is given by my man on the economy, David P Goldman.
In forty years of watching financing markets, I have seen nothing like the global jeer at the Fed’s proposed quantitative easing–not, in any case, since the US de-linked the dollar from gold in 1971. Even in 1980, when then Fed chairman Paul Volcker returned from the October IMF meeting in Belgrade and pushed the fed funds rate into double digits, criticism of the Fed were muted, and made behind closed doors. Now the German finance minister is calling the Fed “clueless” in the newspapers and the Asians are threatening exchange controls.
In any number of ways, the market is telling the Obama administration that it can’t keep expanding US debt indefinitely. That was the message from the president’s bi-partisan Deficit Commission last week, which called the debt expansion a “cancer.” That was the message from China’s leading rating agencies, which downgraded US debt to A+. That was the message from Moody’s, which threatened to put Treasuries on negative watch and possibly remove their AAA rating. And that was the message from the G20, which threatened to erect exchange controls to keep unwanted dollars out.
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