Unfortunately, despite some 12 financing facilities created by the Treasury and the Fed, massive interest rate cuts and various bailouts, the government has little to show for its attempts to dictate where markets should trade.
The Fed's own balance sheet has exploded from roughly $900 billion worth of debt in August to around $2 trillion as of last week. Knowledgeable sources expect that to reach $3 trillion by the end of the year.
That means that it will have grown from approximately 6% of gross domestic product to more than 20% in the space of four months. (For perspective, Japan's balance sheet grew from roughly 9% of GDP to 29% over the 10-year period from 1994 to 2004, as it pursued "quantitative easing," which basically involves the central bank making more cash available to banks to ease lending.)
These numbers and rates of growth are so enormous (and unprecedented) as to be utterly incomprehensible. Does anybody actually think the government has any idea what it's doing?
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