The Federal Reserve plan to buy an additional $600 billion in longer term securities — known as QE2 — is taking flak domestically and from around the world. And rightly so, in my view. Check out e21’s understated but highly critical open letter to Ben Bernanke from a group of economists, investors, and thinkers.
But in some ways, QE2 is nothing new. Yes, it is a departure from the traditional Fed purchases of only very short-term securities. And yes, it could lead to all the problems of which its new critics warn. But this is just the latest round in a long series of mistakes. The new worries are possible currency debasement, inflation, asset bubbles, international turmoil, and avoidance of the real burdens on the U.S. economy — namely fiscal and regulatory policy. These worries are real. But this would be a replay of what already happened in the lead up to the 2008 Panic. Or the 1998 Asian Flu. Or the 2000 U.S. crash.
Here was my warning to the Fed in The Wall Street Journal in 2006:
It is these periods of transition, where the value of the currency is changing fast, but before price changes filter through all commerce and contracts, when financial and political disruptions often take place.
That was two years before a Very Big Disruption. (I followed up with another monetary critique in the WSJ here.)
But over the last few decades, there was no common critique of monetary policy among conservatives, Republicans, libertarians, supply-siders, nor among Democrats, liberals, or Keynesians, etc. (Take your pick of labels: the point is there was no effective coalition with any hope of altering the American monetary status quo. There were, for example, just as many Republican backers of Greenspan/Bernanke, and of America’s weak-dollar policy, as there were detractors.) A silver lining today is that QE2 appears to have united and galvanized a broad and thoughtful opposition to the existing monetary regime. Hopefully these events can spur deeper thinking about a new American — and international — monetary policy that can build a firmer foundation for global financial stability and economic growth.
Columbia’s Charles Calomiris discusses his opposition to the Fed’s QE2
