In his widely anticipated speech at Jackson Hole last week, Fed Chairman Ben Bernanke sounded a supremely optimistic note: "It seems clear, based on this experience, that such (easing) policies can be effective, and that, in their absence, the 2007-09 recession would have been deeper and the current recovery would have been slower than has actually occurred."
The simple truth however, is that our economy has a disease that all the quantitative easing in the world can't cure. And while the wrong medicine may make us appear healthier in the short term, we will continue to deteriorate beneath the surface. Not only should the Fed not provide additional QE, but it should remove the accommodation currently in place. Although these moves would most certainly send us back into recession, it would simultaneously provide a needed course correction that would put us finally on the road to a sustainable recovery.
The recession the Fed is trying so desperately to prevent must be allowed to run its course so that the economy that we have developed over the last decade, the one that is overly reliant on low interest rates, borrowing and consumer spending, can finally restructure itself into something healthier. By enabling this diseased economy to overstay its welcome, QE does more harm than good. To recover for the long haul, the market must be allowed to correct the misallocations of resources that resulted from prior stimulus. Additional stimulus inhibits this process, and exacerbates the size of the misallocations the markets must eventually correct.
- Source, Peter Schiff via Business Insider:
