William Kristol‘s latest item for The Weekly Standard quotes an email from an unidentified “businessman and investor” reacting to this week’s pronouncements from the Federal Reserve. In the quotation, ZIRP refers to “zero-percent interest rates,” while QE is “quantitative easing.”
“These policies (ZIRP and QE) cheat savers out of a fair return on their capital, and virtually promise an explosion of price inflation at some unpredictable point in the future. It is devilishly hard to preserve the value of paper money even when authorities are determined to protect it. The Bernanke Fed, in contrast, is willing to risk everything on its utterly unproven conviction that inflation is not and will not be a problem, and that its supereasy policies will not debase the value of money and cause a run on the dollar against one or more of the following: gold, other currencies, or commodities. Or a massive fall in long-term bond prices. Or a ferocious rise in consumer prices.
“At the same time as the Fed is assuming the role of the principle supporter of the economy, without acknowledging that it might already have done enough (or more than enough), the Obama administration is still promising to raise job providers’ taxes at the earliest opportunity, and is still railing against any real attempt to rein in the unpayable entitlements which make America insolvent.
