I am just worried about the ethics of all this QE. The way it sucks people into the workforce, pretty soon children, cancer patients, and even house pets will be punching 12-hour days. Is this really what we want for our learning-disabled children, to be swept up into a dehumanizing employment dynamo?But that is where we are headed, with this indiscriminate exploitation of the unwilling and even unqualified as productive contributors to some materialistic, self-perpetuating industrial chain reaction with a life only its own.Just the other day I went over to a friend's house, only to find him too weary to drink beer and play dominoes all night. And why? That very day - against his will - he had produced enough goods to fill ten pallets for overseas shipment. And then spent all night shopping at the mall. Completely against his own nature and volition, when all he had wanted to do was watch TV.Economic growth may look good on paper. But it is breaking the dreams of actual flesh-and-blood human beings, who only want someone to pay for their food and phone service so they can smoke weed and sleep all day.

QuoteParticipation rate 62.8%Prior labor force participation rate was 63.0%So much for that cyclical labor-force participation.

It's curious that the participation rate began to rise 20 years after the birth of the first baby boomers and started shrinking 55 years after the birth of the first baby boomers. Perhaps this demographic pig-in-a-python is responsible for some of the patterns of supply and demand driving some % of the population that needs works or needs products/services that require workers.

Will QE increase or decrease inflation? A difficult story: Models that predict the effects of government policy

Adam Button posted these charts on forexlive.com, together with a note that Canada has a greater percentage of old people:US compared to Canada (below) participation:US birth rate:QuoteAlthough an official definition of the baby boom does not exist, it generally describes a period of increased birthrates lasting from 1946 to about 1965. The Great Depression of the 1930s had prolonged the decline in Canada's birthrate (see Population), as it had in most Western countries. The low point in Canada was reached in 1937, when the gross birthrate (the annual number of live births per 1,000 inhabitants) was 20.1. Improved economic conditions caused a recovery that began to accelerate during the Second World War. By 1945 the birthrate had risen to 24.3; by 1946 it had jumped to 27.2, and it remained between 27 and 28.5 per 1,000 inhabitants until 1959, after which it began to gradually decline.

What it really comes down to is interdiction. If they can get a truck of primo weed over the border from Mexico, and make it to Denver to restock in time for the January jobs report, participation will drop another .2%. BANG, the Fed hits their 6.5% unemployment target... rates are going up in about a month.Watch the border. You heard it here first.

What makes me laugh is 'forward guidance'. They basically say that they will do X when metric Y gets to Z. Then when it looks like metric Y is about to get to Z they change Z to be further out of reach. They move the guidelines and every time they do this the market trusts them less and sees foward guidance as being all the more worthless. So, it will be interesting to see what happens when we get to 7.0, errr I mean now 6.5%

Leftists from Barack Obama to Christine LaGarde have been agitating over "wealth inequality" (which is really just allocating economic decisions according to track record). At the same time, the US Congressional Budget Office has predicted that Obamacare will cause the equivalent of more than 2.5 million people to quit working any job, in a choice to get Medicaid rather than working to get health insurance.This is what Democrat Senate Majority Leader Harry Reid said about it:QuoteThe report "rightfully says that people shouldn't have job lock," said Senator Harry Reid of Nevada, the Democratic leader. "We live in a country where we should be free agents. People can do what they want."In a similar vein, Democrat House Minority Leader Nancy Pelosi said on Comedy Central it is all about "the pursuit of happiness" and this frees people to do what the heck they want like go become "a writer" or something.Obviously, these millions of people who quit working are not going to go start 2.5 million new Dell computer companies, or write 2.5 million new Harry Potter books. Rather, they are going to sit in government housing projects smoking weed, sending their children to prison, voting Democrat, and inflating the income gap compared to those who work.So we will get to hear a lot more whining about income inequality, and the plight of these "free" people enjoying the Obamacare utopia.

This is really awesome, it is a new era in American politics. Never before has a leftist politician, that I can remember, promoted his policy as giving people the "opportunity" to not work! In the past they said things would benefit working families, or the disadvantaged, or would create jobs, or whatever. Even if the reality is the policies would turn people into farm animals, they were not sold that way. But here is how White House spokesman Jay Carney is now representing Obamacare:QuoteOpportunity created by affordable, quality health insurance allows families in America to make a decision about how they will work, or if they will work.The part about it being "quality" is still the same old lies. But the Democrats as the party of creating a class of unemployed, unemployable, and very poor people is a pretty honest brand.Even the marxists said "From each according to his ability." But they were idealists. These people just want a locked-in starving voter, so that they can keep writing checks to their cousins to make green batteries and such.And if you make a product for the middle class, something that millions of people consume every day, you can expect to see your prices go down, as people migrate into the dependent subsistence class.Makes me optimistic that sympatric speciation could occur in people.

Here is another sick fuck Rex Nutting who actually envisions himself as a central planner deciding what is best for animals!QuoteDo we still insist that everyone - the young, the old, the sick, the dying - hold down a 40-hour a week job until the day they die?The world doesn't owe us a living, but do we owe it to the world to work until we're all used up? Even a plough horse gets put to pasture eventually.It is serious mental illness that Rex Nutting imagines himself coercing people to work and not work like farm animals, and then refers to his own capricious personal opinions as "the world."He, himself, has set people up as farm animals, and then complained about their plight! As if someone else did it to them! He has moved the locus of decision making from the individual to him, imagining himself as the world. Sick, sick, sick!This is the kind of guy who will go shoot some random kids at a mall, and think he is actually making a statement to or engaging in a dialogue with "the world." "The world" is the sort of imaginary friend that sick adults have.Rex, if you ever read this, you are a dipshit blogger fishing for click traffic from bored old men and conspiracy theorists. Nobody, and I mean nobody anywhere, is ever going to ask you whether he should so much as make a glass of lemonade and sell it.

Very simple, 2 inter-related reasons:1) Liquidity trap; can't force the market to borrow even if rates are near 02) More to the point , banks who control real rates (commercial rates) may be high relative to the the base rate which discourages borrowing and thus dampens inflation not causes it.

Maybe instead of forcing lenders to take more risk, QE forces borrowers to take less risk.Let's simplify with an economy that consists of a single productive enterprise, let's say a farm. Its investors will consist of equity holders, debt holders, and a special super-secured kind of low-risk investors, the government. The government pays its coupons as treasury bonds, and its claims survive any kind of business failure or temporary default. So the farm produces three different kinds of investment opportunities.Now suppose the government leaves, in this case because it is doing its own little inside thing with the central bank (and let's ignore they can still take from investors and employees by competing with them as consumers with printed money). We are left with only two types of investments, risky debt, and risky equity. To continue to serve the same population of investors, the farm will want to take less risk, meaning reduce upside to equity, in order to create debt with less risk, to better serve the zero-risk investors.So instead of planting, let's say, 1/2 tomatoes and 1/2 peaches, they will plant 1/3 potatoes, 1/3 tomatoes, and 1/3 peaches. The potatoes aren't very exciting. But they are almost guaranteed to produce some income stream, even if the tomatoes and peaches fail, leaving the junior investors empty-handed. So it will look like risk-free investors are taking more risk. But in fact the farm is taking less risk, and producing less growth investments.In one theory, the farm is supposed to increase its production by 50%, producing 1/2 peaches, 1/2 tomatoes, and open up a new field to produce an equal portion of potatoes in addition to holding its existing production steady. But another theory says some inputs, such as land, cannot instantly be increased by 50%. So tomato and peach production must be reduced some, let's say 25% if land can only be increased 25%.In one theory, labor demand would still rise 25% in this scenario. But in another theory, it may be that potatoes are less labor intensive. Or potatoes offer fewer opportunities for making salads and pies, so labor needs are reduced elsewhere. Or potatoes are not a growth industry, so the growth is reduced by 25%, and the number of additional workers needed each year does not rise as fast, in fact 25% slower.

Why not use real world examples ?

QuoteOriginally posted by: ctabetterWhy not use real world examples ?I don't have to, the Fed has no real-world counter-argument. Anyway, you would have to at least find the cartoon interesting, before you would push through 700 pages of corporate-finance records going back to 1975 used to draw the same picture.

I think you do otherwise it's all bunk