Fed QE Money Printing Getting Even Wilder!

Interest-Rates / Quantitative Easing
Nov 15, 2010 - 07:53 AM

By: Martin_D_Weiss

I’ve seen a lot of crazy monetary shenanigans in my lifetime — in Brazil, Japan and elsewhere.

But I’ve never seen anything quite like the explosion of out-and-out money printing we’re witnessing in the United States today.



Look. Back in 1999, Fed Chairman Alan Greenspan poured money into the economy to help soften the impact of the feared Y2K bug. Monetary experts thought he had gone wild.

Two years later — this time in response to the 9-11 terrorist attacks — Greenspan did it again. He ran the money printing presses and tried to flood the banking system with liquidity. They said he had gone wilder.

But the piles of money Greenspan printed during those two episodes are anthills in comparison to the mountains Ben Bernanke is printing today.

Below are the numbers. They’re mindboggling.

#1 — Y2K.Between October 6, 1999 and January 12, 2000, the Fed pumped in $73 billion in three months (based on the Fed’s measure of the U.S. monetary base).

#2 — 9-11. In the days immediately following the attacks through September 19, 2001, Greenspan rushed to pump $40 billion into the U.S. economy — one of the largest amounts ever recorded for such a short period.

#3 — QE1. In response to the debt crisis of 2008-2009, the Fed embarked on its first round of “quantitative easingâ€