Wednesday, September 7, 2011

Metal Augmentor does Benny's QE3

To be honest I don't pay as much attention as I should to Metal Augmentor, because it's darned good site to find out about and follow metals and junior miners. However I utterly recommend the thinkpiece out of the stable dated Sept 3rd entitled "Fed Bennie and the Jets of Oz", available on that link. You don't have to agree with it all to know that it was written by a real smart metalshead. Here's an excerpt, go over there for the whole thing:

QE3 we suspect is going to consist of the Fed coaxing banks into expanding their own balances sheets by monetizing the federal deficit. This may also involve the Fed swapping some of its assets – for example Treasury securities maturing in 1 to 5 years – for bank assets of lower quality, thereby improving the banks’ regulatory capital ratios. Then again, Standard & Poor’s is rating a subprime mortgage-backed security AAA after having downgraded U.S. debt to AA+, so who the heck knows what “quality” means anymore?
In any case, the difference is subtle but important. QE1 and QE2 had the effect of increasing the quantity of money; QE3 will focus on increasing the velocity of money. The “Q” in QE3 will likely be “qualitative” instead of “quantitative”.

Continues here