Six or seven years too late, but better late than never, I guess:
Hedge fund heavyweight Doug Kass, president of Seabreeze Partners, apparently doesn't think too highly of the extended duration of the Federal Reserve's easing program.
"The Ah-ha Moment may be at hand, in which confidence in the Federal Reserve (and the other central banks around the world) disintegrates under the weight of a too-lengthy period of zero interest rates and excessive QE and injections of other liquidity," he writes in his blog on Tumblr.
"They explored that space for too long, and the marginal impact of ever more [stimulus] might be diminishing. Indeed, the impact of ever lower interest rates may now be net negative to the U.S. economy," Kass notes.
"May". <chuckle> Perish the thought, Mr. Kass. What could possibly be a "net negative" about hyperinflative currency debasement? Or that the only thing preventing the U.S. dollar from losing complete molecular cohesion and disintegrating into its constituent quarks and gluons is the permanent, artificially engineered, deliberately imposed and maintained economic depression that keeps sopping up all that wastepaper like a supermassive black hole? Just imagine if there ever is any future Republican administration, and what will happen if some green economic shoots are allowed to start peeking through all that socialist cement. Here's a less than entirely metaphorical hint:
Hence my hearty guffaws when Mr. Kass says that the Fed no more macroeconomic "tools". Those "tools" have been the monetary equivalent of mixing oxygen, hydrogen, and a blizzard of sparks that only the relentless Obamanomic drizzle keeps snuffing out.
One commentator has mustered the courage to call for a highly placed Obama apparatchik to actually be held accountable for this monetary malpractice:
New York Post columnist John Crudele doesn't exactly pull any punches when it comes to his view of the Federal Reserve chairwoman.
"Janet Yellen should be fired. Ready, aim, fired," he writes.
And what are her transgressions? First, "she’s the chief manipulator of U.S. financial markets," Crudele says. That puts her in the same position as her predecessors Ben Bernanke and Alan Greenspan, he says.
"Bernanke should also have been fired. Greenspan should have been tarred and feathered for the way he gave in to political pressure and allowed the housing and financial markets to blow themselves into bubbles."
Second, Yellen "was lying" when she said last week that "things are going well" for the economy, Crudele says.
"There have been a slew of disappointing economic reports lately. Durable goods orders in December were abysmal. Retails sales sucked," he writes. Consumer spending dropped 0.3% in December.
"Most of the housing market is still on its keister," Crudele notes. "Corporate earnings were weak in the quarter that ended December 31 and look worse in 2015. . . . Our economy is growing so modestly that commodity prices are collapsing and gasoline is at a many-year low."
Actually, the economy isn't growing at all. It's shrinking, and continues to shrink. Janet Yellen's mission, like that of "Helicopter Ben" before her, is to distract from that grim, bleak, grinding reality with more artificial bubbles than a Polish jacuzzi. Nothing makes so-called economic "experts" think everything is hunky-dory than a Dow soaring above 18,000, even if nothing is holding it up but a gargantuan "updraft".
And when it falls....
Although you can't deny the poetic justice of an anti-dollar Fed Chair holding a pink slip. Which will never, ever happen, of course, because "Old Yellen" is doing precisely what Barack Obama wants her to do, and keep doing.
But it is, after all, a stupendous economic house of cards....
It really is only a matter of time. And probably not very much of it, either.
So what's not about which to be confident? My confidence cup is overflowing. How 'bout yours?
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