The Diminishing Marginal Utility of Quantitative Easing

What Happens When Quantitative Easing Finally Fails

Gregor MacDonald

While markets await details on the next round of quantitative easing (QE) — whether refreshed bond buying from the Fed or sovereign debt buying from the European Central Bank (ECB) — it’s important to ask, What can we expect from further heroic attempts to reflate the OECD economies?

The 2009 and 2010 QE programs from the Fed, and the 2011 operations from the ECB, were intended as shock treatment to hopefully set economies on a more typical, post-recession, recovery pathway. Here in 2012, QE was supposed to be well behind us. Instead, parts of Southern Europe are in outright depression, the United Kingdom is in double-dip recession, and the US is sweltering through its weakest “recovery” since the Great Depression.

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