Why QE2 won't work - Part 1 Supplemental

Further to today's explanation of QE1 (see post below this one) comes this Bloomberg TV interview of David Stockman, the director of the OMB under Ronald Reagan.

Here are his comments on Quantitative Easing and the US Federal Reserve.

• "An independent Fed is what we had when I was in the government. Volcker was the head of it...
  
  Today the Fed is scared to death that the boys and girls and robots on Wall Street are going to have a hissy fit. And therefore these programs, one after another, are simply designed to somehow pacify the stock market, and hoping to keep the stock indexes going up, and that somehow that will fool the people into thinking they are wealthier and they will spend money. The people aren't buying that. Main Street is not stupid enough to believe that engineered rallies as a result of QE2 stimulus are making them wealthier and so they should go out and buy another Coach bag. This is really crazy stuff that I can't say enough negative about...
  
  The Fed is telling a lot of lies to the market... it is telling all the politicians on Capitol Hill you can issue unlimited debt cause it doesn't cost anything. We have $9 trillion of marketable debt. Upwards of 70% of that has maturities of 5 years or less down to 90 days. All of those maturities are 1% down to 10 basis points. So from the point of view of Congress, the cost of carrying the debt is essentially free. When you tell politicians they can issue $100 billion of debt a month for free, how do you expect them to do the right thing, and ask their constituents to sacrifice...
  
  I think the Fed is injecting high grade monetary heroin into the financial system of the world, and one of these days it is going to kill the patient."

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