FED UP: Words About QE
Comment I wrote upon reading research involving how fucked we are and have been for a while now...
Lifted from research by u/Datasinc (Reddit: persian_bull)
Found here in full: https://www.reddit.com/r/Superstonk/comments/qassc0/hyperinflation_is_coming_the_dollar_endgame_part/
“The correlation coefficient between central bank quantitative easing and the price of stock indexes is nearly 1....”
That's the most important data point perhaps this century. I mean, fuck. Anyone who knows this and understands what it means understands that it's already too late. We (the global financial system) ARE FUCKED and have no way back. That's it. Without wholesale structural reform of the ENTIRE system, this ends in financial meltdown and Armageddon the likes of which will make 2008 feel like a comfy fart.
The pain we didn't allow our system to take in 2008 has been waiting for us all this time, and growing stronger all along. Because the Corpos and Elites were unwilling to endure the systemic shocks of the past and let capitalism do its ugly work, the meltdown that's coming has ballooned into something SO LARGE that it will away entire continental economies. No nations or sectors can survive it.
Even 2008 wouldn't have been the bloodbath that this is going to be. For sure it would have been one and WAS for plenty of us. But instead of allowing that same pain to register on the business side, the Washington fuckbags made a lot of noise with their whoopy cushion-like mouths and explained to John Q. Public that this pain is only for you, you see, because it would be TOO PAINFUL FOR US TO ENDURE and that could mean the entire collapse of our banking system, Too Big To Fail.
So John, will you take some more of this pain, a part of the slice meant for us, so we can keep our yachts and summer mansions? We REALLY JUST CAN'T go back to having only two homes, because, well, we're bankers and as bankers we give loans to every kind of business and our whole economy could be affected and we um, we just like our bank and we don't think you want to go through all that trouble to get a new bank. See John, if we fail, then smaller banks will buy our assets at fire sale prices, and when that happens, your assets will go down, and your 401K looks pretty good so.... WILL YOU BUY ALL OUR WORTHLESS SHIT SO WE DON'T HAVE TO EVER TAKE THE LOSS?
And so we did that, allowed our public to take the debt so just ONE sector of the economy would not topple over. The magnitude was inflated back then: they spoke about it the way they SHOULD be speaking about what is coming up today. That's how you know they are scared so shitless as to NOT mention it at all. If you listened closely then, the banking industry and regulator's language mirrored that of a drug addict and a drug dealer.
QE was the heroin they needed to avoid the pain of withdrawal, and the Fed was only too happy to supply it as it had in all previous crises. But they got the order of magnitude wrong, as they so often do. They are greedy, selfish drug addicts you see, who want all of it for themselves. They allowed the general population of our country to SUFFER MIGHTILY THRU WITHDRAWAL while they didn't, due to a belief that TOO MUCH SUPPLY of $ added to the system would hyper inflate it.
What they really did was allow the real economy to lay down and die while the banking sector and markets were revived (by optics alone) in nominal fashion. Normalized yields and volatility measures returned and using their stethoscope in just the right way they could convince investors and companies we'd "returned" to a "new normal."
What actually happened is they let our real growth and expected potential continue to die off, at the price of a one-time MAJOR INJECTION of capital that shocked the system into a kind of zombie life and we've been there ever since.
Nominal income and nominal prices are only optics. The real economy beneath it has been essentially lifeless since 2008. They had two correct solutions potentially and they did neither.
1. Would have been allowing the dead financial institutions to unravel and supervising the bankruptcy and asset sales through the regulatory agencies. A difficult and long process which requires actuarial professionals of a high skill level and those who understand counterparty risk management. The big banks would've been broken and sold piece wise to smaller better capitalized regional and locals, while the toughest cookie (AIG) could've been QE'd by the IMF and a global union of professionals put together for the daunting task of unwinding its many asset classes specifically. I saw a great layout of how it could be done years ago but it escapes me now, ZeroHedge had it. The currency markets would've gone to triage and it would have been a bad year or so, but then on the back end you'd have returned to a healthier economy by now, where prices and wage growth started to come in line and borrowing and credit could be extended further, and real GDP growth could kick upward to expected levels. (this is the missed 8.2 trillion peruvian_bull mentions)
2. Go BIG or GO HOME. Krugman and many of the other Fedsuckers are wrong often but a few earnest ones who DIDN'T want to see an eventual complete destruction of our world economy argued for this. They should've done SOMETHING to make the AMERICAN PEOPLE AND BUSINESSES financially whole back then. A stimulus check, mortgage deference, grace periods on bills WHATEVER. The supply side of the economy (i.e. those who put the $ into circulation) cant just be IGNORED when a crisis in one economic sector SPREADS, most especially when that sector (like the banks) had SIGNIFICANT EXPOSURE in other areas like real estate. You've got to do something to make sure people stay employed and paying their Bill's and buying beer and cigarettes and renovating their kitchens and all the other shit economic actors do.
- If you don't do that (#2) businesses don't sell as much, because no one is coming in the door. People can't buy the weird types of tiles for their bathroom floor at Home Depot. Inventories shrink and go down to basics. Ordering budgets get reduced and out of stocks start popping up all the time. Outlooks and growth forecasts get lowered, and business credit availability shrinks. Earnings targets go down and more Quarterly misses occur. Eventually, shareholders get nervous and start selling as share prices start to tumble, due to real conditions on the ground worsening. The stock price falls and the bosses get nervous. Fucking shit! What are we gonna do? HOW IS THE FED GONNA HELP US, LIKE THEY DID FOR THAT FUCKER AT THE BANK I PLAY GOLF WITH?
There's only one solution left to help that institution, from the purview of the Fed. Can you guess what it is??
That's right: Quantitative EASING!
I hope I could help to explain some of this to you guys, if you're not savvy on economics. I went to school for it for some damn reason, but most of it is common sense. There's a reason that President Trump during the pandemic placed stimulus checks in our hands, employed lawfare and other techniques I mentioned above to keep Americans afloat and spending $. There's a reason we shot out of the pandemic like there was a rocket up our ass right up until Biden took the wheel. Not saying they did everything right, the lockdowns destroyed businesses 10x and collapsed market share, propelling an untold amount of public $ into the hands of a few robber barons and created record numbers of new billionaires in a shockingly small amount of time. A lot of it was really fucked for sure and it was all manufactured. To keep "them" from taking their medicine once again.
It's like a guy at work who starts cleaning some machine or component on your shift. Then he comes and says Hey man I've got to go to this meeting right now but I'm coming back to finish this! Parts laying around everywhere. You take a bathroom break 2.5 hours later, avoiding the clutter he has left all throughout the hallway, to find him standing in a group of managers and talking. He winks at you and smiles, indicating I'll be back for it!
Now it's almost closing time for the day and shit everywhere still. He has to start his other responsibilities and can't get back to his project, so it's on you to do both your job AND his. Effectively, he did nothing except create a big fucking mess and then coax you into doing almost the whole job for him because you want to leave your job with everything done and where things are supposed to be. (This would equivocated to the way in which we as Americans mostly have shame and dignity and avoid lying, cheating and other bad behaviors that if known or found out could cause us embarrassment, whereas our elite class just says FUCK YOU I’M NOT SORRY, does whatever they want, and says the magic words or pays money to make it go away. They have no interests other than “more for me, none for you, don't care what happens to you give me what I want!" and they don’t care who knows it, much like a sociopath they do not have any feelings that aren’t their own and are incapable of imagining such a world) Anyways…
He will later take credit for cleaning the equipment and get more consideration for his next promotion because of it. All he had to do was be a fucking idiot and make a mess with good intentions, and not enough time or resources to actually deliver on it.
This is what our financial system governance does to us. They half ass it. You are SUPPOSED TO either do something all the way yourself or just don't do it at all. The government messes around in the market, creating the inefficiency. THEN they burden you the taxpayer with an expensive and time consuming solution that is required to fix it, so you bear the entire load of it and are due the suffering that's originally meant for them! The corporation passes on the problem to you! Either let the market run and leave it alone, OR come in big enough to COMPLETELY solve the problem. They never do either which allows them to take credit for our hard work, so ingeniously solving problem after problem of their own creation.
Growth and destruction are a part of the system. We've delayed the second part so long that the whole thing is going to go under now. Innocents will NOT be spared.
These fucking idiots think they can just switch our system out with another one overnight and that isn't going to work. Someone always has to pay.
I wonder now if QE and assets will hit a -1 delta soon. 🤣
Nothing to do about it now though! Keep pumping away you jerks! Now the fed is buying assets while they INCREASE rates. Opposite signals and opposite pushes but in their infinite wisdom they ‘think’ they know orders of magnitude and can predict what the economic effects in full will be. They can’t of course.
They should have just done negative fed funds rates and attracted buying interest back that way, essentially we are going to land on the same spot from it that they feared would happen with that. Up is down, and we are going to get blown up coming and going.
They tried stop in late 2018 (October I think conveniently enough) Dow dipped 400 points just on the threa tof ending QE.
The water is running out, despite the faucets all on full blast. Additional money supply increases are no longer pushing the phony nominal stock prices upward and commodity price increases. Why don't it work like it did before Mama Janet?!?
Its because the smoothbrains don't understand the basic forces of supply and demand. Traditionally the Fed only could tickle supply i.e. adding to M1 thru adjusting fed funds/interest rates. After 2008 and QE, the Fed began stimulus for demand side, i.e. asset buying programs. This was unprecedented and economic minds with sound reasoning warned of the hazard it posed. It set a precedent for a nanny state where the Fed would "save" anyone from their own spurious and risk taking behaviors for one.
Beyond that it fundamentally changed the way financial institutions viewed and cooperated with the Fed in the marketplace. The Fed was on the buyer side now, supposedly just long enough to allow institutions to recoup from the massively depreciated assets that were fouling up their books so bad they were fundamentally insolvent. Just buy those baddies up til we reach the solvency point.
But the bullshit was never going to end and they were too myopic to see that. Now with the Fed in the market on the other side, why would my bank even deal in those asset classes at all? Why change my behavior? If no regulation compels me why would I deal with this at all when the Fed is just going to buy up their own shittiest forms of debt? Fuck that, I want to make money let the Fed be the one to "do the right thing."
QE fundamentally changed the market and the banks were allowed to flee from their own mess. Not only that, but further creations of "mess" would NOT be taken by the banks to their balance sheets - not when the Fed still exists in the market to add that nasty shit to its balance sheet. I DONT WANT IT!
The Fed never adopted a proper exit strategy for QE and now THERE NEVER WILL BE ONE. The banks have gotten too comfortable with having someone else dealing in those debt classes and adding them to a balance sheet that doesn't mean shit to them. This allowed them to return to proper quarterly targets without a loss and the credit markets to unfreeze. But the problem is the balance sheet belongs to us the American taxpayer and WE are going to pay for it, and so as OUR finances begin to drain from the inflation endless fucking QE inevitably causes.
As this happens and we all go broke, banks begin to lose their capitalization and credit starts to get frost on it again. Its coming around the globe to fuck them from the other side, see? EVEN WORSE NOW THE FED HAS TO RAISE RATES TO PREVENT MAIN STREET FROM TOTALLY EXPLODING, SO WE CANT KEEP CAPITALIZED BY BORROWING AT ZERO ANYMORE! What do we do? Fuck, change the capitalization standards? Already did! Do it more! NOOOOO
The pain they didn't want is coming for them and it's going to take us down with the ship too. Its because they never did a stimulus from both sides in the economic crisis! The real economy is a dream deferred and now they have to wake up to it. They've been manipulating the nominal numbers a long time now and it just is getting too big to control. Bubbles formed and ready to pop in foreign real estate and student loans. Trillions spent just blowing on a bonfire like it's a boo-boo. Time's almost up!