This is the wildest story yet about American economic management that if you understand it will terrify you. It is from the Wall Street Journal and is titled, “Confessions of a Quantitative Easer”:

Having been at the Fed for seven years, until early 2008, I was working on Wall Street in spring 2009 when I got an unexpected phone call. Would I come back to work on the Fed’s trading floor? The job: managing what was at the heart of QE’s bond-buying spree—a wild attempt to buy $1.25 trillion in mortgage bonds in 12 months. Incredibly, the Fed was calling to ask if I wanted to quarterback the largest economic stimulus in U.S. history.

You and I have, of course, never heard of this guy till now but he has quite a story to tell. If you are interested in knowing how the economic world you live in is “managed” this is one port of call you might make. This is just included as a teaser:

Where are we today? The Fed keeps buying roughly $85 billion in bonds a month, chronically delaying so much as a minor QE taper. Over five years, its bond purchases have come to more than $4 trillion. Amazingly, in a supposedly free-market nation, QE has become the largest financial-markets intervention by any government in world history.

As he says:

We were working feverishly to preserve the impression that the Fed knew what it was doing.

What they are doing is riding on the back of a tiger. Those idiots who voted for Obama to help the poor and the disadvantaged, what a bad joke that is. If Goldman Sachs is your favourite charity then maybe you’re onto something. Otherwise, if you are dumb enough to work you can help repay this debt while they drive off to the Hamptons.

[Picked up from Powerline.]