To be sure, Matt Taibbi is wrong about a lot of things. He is dead on with respect to Quantitative Easing. Writes Taibbi in his RS blog post The Fed’s Magic Money-Printing Machine :
A more overtly anticapitalist and oligarchical pattern of behavior than the Fed’s “Quantitative Easing” program could not possibly be imagined, but the country is strangely silent on the issue.
He then adds an accurate description of Helicopter Ben’s first round of Quantitative Easing.
Bernanke printed over a trillion dollars out of thin air, then used that money to buy, among other things, mortgage-backed securities (MBS) and Treasury Bonds. In other words, the government was printing money to a) lend to itself and b) prop up the housing market, with Wall Street stepping in to take a big cut.
Just in case anyone still doubts Mr. Taibbi’s understanding of the issue...
And jobs, I suppose, may theoretically be created by all this dollar meth being injected into the financial bloodstream – although the inflationary effect of printing trillions upon trillions of new dollars would probably wipe out the value of the money you make at that job. When it comes to calculating what QE actually does for you, or how much it harms you, that question is just very hard to answer.
Though Matt Taibbi is by no stretch of the imagination adherent to the Austrian Theory, when it comes to the Fed, he has seen the light. At least some small part of the left finally sees through the obfuscatory Fed speak and recognizes it as the antithesis of free-markets and merely a sophisticated tool by which wealth is transferred from the poor to the banks and federal government.
