QE4
So what exactly is this new thin-air money printing program all about? Well, unlike any prior Quantitative Easing (QE) announcement, this one was tied to a fuzzy and quirky government statistic: the unemployment rate.
QE4 is Just-In-Time Fed Policy to Avoid Calamity
Dec 13, 2012
We got the most thunderous Just-In-Time monetary policy today that is a substitute for the absence of any degree of stimulative fiscal policy.
You might say that QE4 is now going to act as both monetary and fiscal stimulus– another $85 billion worth of Fed accumulations of Treasury bonds and mortgages- that is meant to keep stock prices moving higher and residential home sales climbing briskly.
The goal is to drive economic activity, especially residential home building, so that unemployment drops from 7.7% to 6.5%. The surprise move is meant to signal the Fed’s awareness of the softening economy; it sees the gritty numbers before we do.
Getting unemployment down to 6.5% without inflation rising to a level higher than 2.5% is not expected to happen until 2014 at the earliest. And it could go longer if there is no deal and we go over the cliff.
But, you should know that the only reason unemployment is 7.7% is because hundreds of thousands of males have dropped out of the search for regular work. A very depressing tale.
The key point here is that the Fed is now actively running both monetary and fiscal policy because it will now be in the business of funding nearly 100% of all the new government deficit spending in 2013. And it is pumping a bit more than $1 trillion of hot, thin-air money into the economy as it does so.
The odd thing here is that by tying their policy to the unemployment rate, we could be in for a very long wait for the stimulus to end. The reason is that the unemployment rate has a couple of moving pieces, one being the number of people who are unemployed, and the second consisting of people who have given up looking for work, which is tracked in something called the 'participation rate.'
As more people leave the labor force and the participation rate goes down, the unemployment rate goes down, too. Somewhat confusingly, as more jobs are created, the unemployment rate goes down, too. As you can see, these numbers work in opposition to each other because as more jobs become available, more people re-enter the work force.
Before the crisis struck, the participation rate was around 66.5%. But now it sits at just 63.6%, meaning that, at roughly 1.4 million jobs for each percent, a bit more than 4 million jobs would have to be created just to absorb the folks who left the labor force but presumably would like to work again. As those 4 million folks come back to work, the unemployment rate will not budge at all.