QE Was Designed To Enrich the 1%

Dallas Fed President Richard Fisher has been a thoughtful dissenter all along on the lunacy of QE and the Fed’s massive bond buying spree. But now he has left nothing to the imagination, admitting that Bernanke’s objective all along was to aggressively levitate the price of financial assets and thereby confer massive windfall gains on the wealthy who own most of them. And all this was done in pursuit of some whacked-out, latter-day Keynesian version of “trickle down” economics, which, according to Bubbles Ben, was for the good of the average American—even if they didn’t appreciate it, comprehend it, demand it, or vote for it.

And that’s the heart of the problem. The average American does not need a monetary politburo comprised of 19 more or less self-selected dictators to decide what’s best for them economically. Once upon a time we had a far better decision mechanism called the free market and a wonderful financial market governor called the price of money and debt, aka market-based interest rates. Under that regime, savers got an honest reward for deferring current consumption and spending; borrowers faced the true economic cost of debt to finance their projects; speculators faced the risk of sudden, sharp changes in the cost of carry when markets got frothy; and investors discovered in the market a valid “cap rate” against which to figure the return on their investments.

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