The Dumpsterfire Economy

[Rajoo]

Originally Posted by whell

They've been doing that FOR YEARS now - that what "quantitative easing" was all about" - and that's what has held down interest rates and was one of the primary drivers of the stock run up under Obama. The US Treasury sold trillions of dollars of bonds each year to paper over the US government deficit. The Federal Reserve printed trillions in extra money to buy these government bonds.

QE was fine in some respects. It certainly allowed the gov't to finance debt at lower rates. The negative side of that, of course, is that it lowered the pain of borrowing and did little to curb the appetite to spend. It allowed people to refinance homes at great rates and helped financial institutions earn an outsized profits without taking much risk (I'm sure the Dem's Wall Street donors were pleased about this.)

On the other hand, while big banks were making big money due to lower rates, they didn't made loans more easily accessible to people and companies.
All that talk about financial disaster that helped the Fed sell the idea of QE probably made banks more conservative when it came to loans. They also had the increased oversight of Dodd Frank to make them more risk averse.

But the other big thing that QE accomplished: it has made the stock market soar. Interest rates have remained so low for so long that investors have had no other choice but to move their money into the stock market. Now that rates are edging up, its letting some air out of the bubble.

This wasn't difficult to foresee. It does create an opportunity for the Dems to make some political hay, however. Nothing new there either.

Now from my new hero, Rand Paul from his speech to the Senate yesterday shutting down the government symbolically for a few hours, or till Nancy lost her nerve [ ].

"When the Democrats are in power, Republicans appear to be the conservative party," Paul said at one point. "But when Republicans are in power, it seems there is no conservative party. The hypocrisy hangs in the air and chokes anyone with a sense of decency or intellectual honesty."

The simple fact is that Republicans in the Obama era defined themselves primarily as committed to reducing government spending and shrinking the nation's debt. The ur-document of that age was Paul Ryan's budget, in which he proudly touted the need to confront entitlement spending and make the hard cuts necessary to keep the country solvent for the foreseeable future.

"Our debt is a threat to this country," Ryan said in a 2013 speech at the Conservative Political Action Conference. "We have to tackle this problem before it tackles us."

And as we can see, Ryan sure tackled the debt problem by raising it another $300 Billion in the next two years. Hypocrisy of the GOP has no limits.

Now for the punchline:

"The reason I'm here tonight is to put people on the spot," Paul said. "I want people to feel uncomfortable. I want them to have to answer people at home who said, 'How come you were against President Obama's deficits, and then how come you're for Republican deficits?' "

A good speech from grandstanding Rand Paul though the bastard voted for the same tax cuts that his cohorts in the Senate and House vote for. That make him just as bad a hypocrite, but try telling him that.

https://www.cnn.com/2018/02/08/polit...sis/index.html