Friday, April 3, 2009

Quantitative Easing: The Riddle

Eric Sprott runs the Sprott funds in which I have a lot of my money. In this article he foresees that Quantitative Easing can create a spiral in which the Fed is unable to stop buying bonds:

The US government will be issuing boatloads of debt over the next few years, stuffing the bond markets with an ever-increasing supply, which somebody will have to buy lest interest rates go higher and derail the stimulus. Enter quantitative easing, but this creates the riddle: will people still want to own US bonds given the deteriorating fiscal situation and the fact that the government is the only willing buyer? ... the Federal Reserve eventually becomes the largest, and perhaps even only, buyer of US government debt, realizing that it can’t stop doing so because the termination of the policy would send interest rates to the moon. We would then have the perverse situation where the government would run burgeoning deficits and incur massive debts, financed with ever-increasing debt issuances, which would in turn be bought by the Federal Reserve with neverending quantities of freshly printed money. In effect, government deficits will be financed with printed money.

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