Quantitative easing (QE) is a monetary policy used by some central banks to increase the supply of money by increasing the excess reserves of the banking system, generally through buying of the central government's own bonds to stabilize or raise their prices and thereby lower long-term interest rates.

This policy is usually invoked when the normal methods to control the money supply have failed, i.e the bank interest rate, discount rate and/or interbank interest rate are either at, or close to, zero. It has been termed the electronic equivalent of simply printing legal tender.

We asked Mikey if he likes this kind of "Life"

"What's this stuff?"

"Some new Economic Policy!

"It's supposed to be good for you"

"I'm not going to try it!"

"Let's get Mikey, Yeah, He won't eat it, he hates everything!"

Mikey:

Ben's focus on the stock market ahead of jobs and housing for Americans is easy to understand. As part of the President's working group on the Markets (aka the Plunge Protection Team) The Fed has been creating the cash used to buy up huge blocks of stocks to keep the market up even though there should have been corrections to bring the stock prices down to a realistic P/E to the stocks' actual value. As a result a large part of the Fed's not-seen-by-the-public balance sheet consists of those stocks the Fed bought up. (One reason for the Fed to oppose Ron Paul's request for an audit is that the Fed isn't supposed to be tinkering with the stock market and revelation of the extent to which it has might break through the denial of Wall Street investors and trigger a panic.) So the Fed's balance sheet is now hostage to the state of the market. In a major stock downturn, and despite their printing presses, the Fed could find themselves technically insolvent. That is why Ben, who has declared in a recent Op-Ed that he is accountable to nobody but the Fed, is declaring "Every Man For Himself" as his new economic policy.