Fed President Plosser, a voting member of the FOMC, indicated in his speech in Helsinki last week that the "hurdle for QE3" is high. Chairman Bernanke has voiced a similar opinion. There is considerable ink that has been devoted to the soft patch the U.S economy is current experiencing which almost always includes mention of the Fed's view that justification for QE3 is more stringent than QE2. more »

The second round of quantitative easing is drawing to a close. Legitimately, the QE2 trade was ‘officially over’ in late March. My comments from March about a potential QE3 are still operative: My sense from the totality of Fed communications - from… more »

RooBy "regime preserving" we mean end-games that don't need the sweeping systemic changes that characterized the administrations of Andrew Jackson or Franklin Roosevelt. In fact, the regime preserving end-games discussed below could keep most of the current institutions (e.g., the Federal Reserve) in place, even if those institutions are pushed far outside of their conventional operating zones. more »

The people at Alphaville have recently quoted Deutsche Bank as saying: The $2 trillion in purchases have literally gone down a black hole. Required reserves haven’t been required to increase and the Fed reserve add has literally simply been hoarded as cash. more »

QE2 is supposed to wrap up sometime in June. The question is: will it actually end in June? Or, to rephrase that question in a more political context: is it in anybody's interest to have it end then? more »