Pointless Printing

On Wednesday, we'll know for sure. No, not the election results, but the level of dollar printing from the Fed.

Nov. 2 (Bloomberg) -- The Federal Reserve will probably introduce an unprecedented second round of unconventional monetary easing tomorrow by announcing a plan to buy at least $500 billion of long-term securities, according to economists surveyed by Bloomberg News.

What's the plan here? What's the model we're following? After we print $500B of meaningless paper and use it to buy government debt, we will ... what?

At least with the stimulus bill, they used economic models to predict the future. No matter how much you disagree with the Obama Administration, they did their best to have an intellectual foundation to their actions. That it turned out to be nonsense isn't a bad thing unless we don't learn from it. As far as the Fed printing money goes, I have yet to find any long-term planning in it. We're just replacing borrow-and-spend with print-and-spend and hoping for the best.

"John? John Maynard Keynes? Is that you?"