Thursday, November 04, 2010

Bank of Japanization of Fed

My capacity of English severely constrains how to make up a new word, but it seems to me that the Fed is clearly going to follow after the BoJ, in the sense that the next move would be nothing less than the de-facto inflation targeting where the BoJ is on the way.

At the FOMC meeting, the Fed decided to buy $75 billion of long-term Treasury securities per month by the end of June in 2011, which totals $600 billion. At the time of QE1, the Fed purchased $300 billion over 6 months. The magnitude and term of QE2 is at least larger than QE1.

A little bit interesting to me is that the Fed will keep reinvesting principal payments from its securities holdings. The Fed is now buying about $30 billion of long-term Treasury securities per month as a reinvestment of principal payments. It's not much compared with the new purchase, but the Fed's intention would be that there is no reason to stop it right now.

It would be better to gauge the impact of the mid-term election, where the Democrats were heavily blown, on the economy, but it's beyond my ability. My guess is that the congress will be so paralyzed that the next big push from fiscal arena is difficult to be taken into account as a reliable and expected economic policy. So, the next Fed's move would be far bolder and greater than thought to make up for fiscal inability.

If the Bank of Japanization means the incompetence of monetary policy, what would be left to stimulate the economy? Could paralyzed congress save the country? The US seems to be getting into a very, very hard time.

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