$100 billion here…$900 billion there…and none of it real money…
AND NOW, the deluge. Or should we call it the Torrent Signal that our mate Kris Sayce has been banging on about for the last week? asks Dan Denning in his Daily Reckoning Australia.
That’s right – that gushing, gurgling, sputtering, splurging sound you hear is the sound of hundreds of billions of new US Dollars flooding into the economy and the stock market. Over the next eight months, the Federal Reserve will spend an additional $600 billion it doesn’t have buying US bonds in the name of “price stability”.
If Kris is right, price stability is the last thing you’ll see at the small-cap end of town in resource-rich Australia. For a variety of reasons, Fed policy doesn’t seem to just trickle down into the small caps and junior Gold Mining and resource sectors. It rages on through like Old Man River.
All up, the Fed is going to chuck in about $100 billion a month into the market. It said more large-scale asset purchases were possible if inflation was too low or unemployment too high. Remember, the Fed has a dual mandate of price stability and full employment. These days, price stability apparently means creating enough money to support asset prices, lest they crash.
Even though we’ve said it before, it’s worth repeating: Everything the Fed does these days is designed to support US banks. Monetizing US government debt doesn’t do a lick of a good to improve the quality of the assets on US bank balance sheets. The Fed is merely trying to keep interest rates from spiking; an event which would send even more banks into terminal decline because of its affect on the housing market (which is already in serious trouble) and would put households in further defensive mode.
As far as the stock market is concerned, there are a lot of green numbers on the screen this morning. Because this $600 billion announcement was in the Goldilocks spot – not too large, not too small…just big enough to please the market without being so big it scared anyone about how inflationary it really is.
Please note that the Aussie Dollar moved above parity on the Fed move and stayed there. Is parity the new normal for the Aussie? Maybe. Speaking for ourselves, we’ve been waiting for a big correction in silver and gold to add to our precious metals holdings. But it just hasn’t come yet.
What could this mean? It could mean that the inter-market relationships that seemed to govern the movement of the Aussie Dollar, the US Dollar, and precious metals prices are breaking down. The greenback is getting weaker relative to everything else. The Fed contributes to this with its march to restore monetary insanity. Two years of grid-locked Washington dealing with a fiscal nightmare probably add fuel to the Dollar’s fire.
By the way, the real amount of QE, when you add in the Fed rolling over mortgage purchases, is closer to $900 billion. That’s almost enough to start a new war. But what’s a few hundred billion here and there when it’s not real money anyway?
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