Night of the Living Fed

Jeremy Grantham has some fun at the Fed’s expense:

The Ruinous Cost of Fed Manipulation of Asset Prices: My diatribe against the Fed’s policies of the last 15 years became, by degrees, rather long and complicated. So to make it easier to follow, a summary precedes the longer argument. (For an earlier attack on the Fed, see “Feet of Clay” in my 3Q 2002 Quarterly Letter.)

Purpose: If I were a benevolent dictator, I would strip the Fed of its obligation to worry about the economy and ask it to limit its meddling to attempting to manage inflation. Better yet, I would limit its activities to making sure that the economy had a suitable amount of liquidity to function normally. Further, I would force it to swear off  manipulating asset prices through artifi cially low rates and asymmetric promises of help in tough times – the Greenspan/Bernanke put. It would be a better, simpler, and less dangerous world, although one much less exciting for us students of bubbles. Only by hammering away at its giant past mistakes as well as its dangerous current policy can we hope to generate enough awareness by 2014: Bernanke’s next scheduled reappointment hearing.”

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Source:
Night of the Living Fed
Jeremy Grantham
GMO, 10/26/2010
http://bit.ly/aPD4va

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