I have noticed that finance blogs, money managers and reports from Investment Banks place significant weight on QE. Some as being a way to save the stock market if not the economy. Some as a dangerous manipulation of markets.
What is not clear is what exactly they believe is happening here?
As economists we have thoughts and debates on this but I am not even clear on how to engage the financial community because I am not clear on what it is they are suggesting is happening.

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Saturday ~ April 21st, 2012 at 7:16 am
Richard Williamson
There is no ‘way’ the ‘financial community’ thinks about it. The time and effort you need to put in to think clearly about monetary policy has a high opportunity cost (time spent looking at company accounts/micro factors/schmoozing clients/gathering market information/networking/cocaine and hookers etc.). Like most things, scratching the surface of this issue unleashes a hodge-podge of a) isolated factoids remembered from college/MBA/CFA class, b) inappropriate historical and other analogies and c) vague recollections about something some ‘expert’ said. The reasons are usually idiosyncratic, and engagement need to be adapted to those idiosyncrasies.
The only suggestion I would make is to get a hold of a CFA economics syllabus, and realise this is only a tiny fraction of the course. Indeed, it is even arguable not to go overboard on revising the economics for the exam, because the amount of material relative to the proportion of marks available is quite high. It’s just not a priority, and this was especially true before 2008 when most people in finance learned most of the things they will ever learn about economics. And you see the result.
Saturday ~ April 21st, 2012 at 9:36 am
curtd59
(I wish there was a like button for this comment.)
Saturday ~ April 21st, 2012 at 10:02 am
Richard Williamson
Curt, I’m not sure I believe what you think I believe. I am personally greatly uncertain about what the exact effects of monetary policy and why. And I certainly don’t believe the opinions of Wall Street are irrelevant, they are very relevant indeed! But I interpreted Karl as asking about the existence of a *framework* for thinking about it, and my limited experience is that framework is quite muddled, and there is no single framework which is shared across the ‘finance community’. Which I find unsurprising because if I was in finance, making sure I had a clear framework for thinking about monetary policy would be fairly low on my list of priorities.
Saturday ~ April 21st, 2012 at 10:14 am
Richard Williamson
To clarify, by ‘the result’ I didn’t mean ‘mass stupidity’ but something like ‘lots of people talking past each other, unable to understand what the other is saying because of a lack of a common frame of reference’ (have I persuaded you that I’m a reasonable guy, just trying to figure things out?
)
Saturday ~ April 21st, 2012 at 10:42 am
curtd59
Ryan. I am not projecting. Or attributing. I agree that they don’t have a framework that’s other than muddled. That’s all I”m saying too. That said, I dont think ‘it’matters’ precisely because of that lower priority and muddled framework. And because the cost to alter them will rapidly be compensated for. More-so than anyone else is compensated. THey have the most liquid capital.
I simply extended the WS example up to the national level, where the frustration Karl has (and the rest of the circuit has — and I do too) that we cannot enact policy because of factionalization and ideology. All of whch is muddled.
We all beat a drum. My drum is that people object to intertemporal transfers between classes, each of whom is represented by a different ideologically aligned group of economists, where the groups of economists fail to seek compromise by composing a suite of policies consisting of ‘borrowings’ not ‘transfers’. The politicians are more muddled than wall street, and likely not in the same half-sigma to start with. So I blame the economists. I blame the left in particular because the right (other than the extreme people at my end) are offering compromises all the time in exchange for QE/Spending.
So sorry if it seemed that I put words in your mouth. But I do believe I understood you correctly. I just took the argument further.
Thanks for playing in the sandbox.
Curt
Saturday ~ April 21st, 2012 at 9:08 am
Morgan Warstler
If CEO pay was weighted correctly, so it was not just on stock price but also on interest rates – so CEO pay only really went up when we got off the zero bound, there would be no such confusion.
When you can kick ass while interest rates are high, you are the real Chuck Norris.
Saturday ~ April 21st, 2012 at 9:36 am
curtd59
@Morgan.
Yes, access to credit is the most important competitive advantage a company can have.
The left rails against corporatism, and they’re right to do so. But by focusing on moralistic arguments about ‘evil’ ceo’s instead of the fact that the interest-rate bias favors these large companies, the argument loses its validity in public discourse.
Further, conservatives see corporations and financiers as a defense against the expansionary state, which interferes with the conservative economy of norms.
As one of those evil CEO’s myself, but of midmarket rather than F500, I am more keenly aware that CEO’s make all the difference in companies that cannot rely upon credit, and far less difference in companies that can rely upon credit and markets for funding. But to argue against CEO pay simply feeds the fires of class warfare.
Credit-driven corporatism is the unfair issue to deal with. That has wide support. Anthropomorphization in all its cases is best left to the radical left.
Saturday ~ April 21st, 2012 at 9:25 am
curtd59
ISN”T THE REAL PROBLEM HERE YOU? (Mainstream)
Wall Street staff are in the business of planning and policy interferes with their plans, both by uncertainty and by impact.
Like any specialization with a defined methodology and therefore a limited scope of understanding, Wall Street’s opinion is irrelevant (as @Richard Williamson says above) as their opinions are too unsophisticated to have meaning.
WS is a mob not a hierarchy. WS is only material in how they REACT to change. How they react to change in the short term will be negative — to anything that interferes with their existing plans. Where ‘plans’ in this case are vague heuristic assumptions. But because they have the highest liquidity and most flexible liquidity of any industry in the market, their cost for changing plans is lower than the cost of changing plans for anyone else in the market.
So, the problem with advancing QE/Spending policy is not wall street. It is politics, of which WS is just one constituency.
And the problem of politics is the failure of the four groups of ECONOMIC IDEOLOGISTS to compose an economic program that PREVENTS INVOLUNTARY TRANSFERS between groups and instead BORROWS FROM AND REWARDS GROUPS. Where groups profit from different temporal positions on the human production cycle, and where that production cycle manifests itself as time preference.
Your assumption is instead, that it will ‘trickle through’ the economy, making you no different from any one of the OTHER groups of economic ideologists who want to rewards to ‘trickle up’ or ‘trickle down’ or ‘trickle out from the entrepreneurial middle’. ‘Trickling’ produces all sorts of involuntary transfers, of status, of risk, of opportunity, and of wealth. We are not children, we do not have to play one note. we can compose a chord of solutions.
The fantasy of the egalitarian community of common interest, for some reason, blinds left-economists and moderates alike to the inequality of function and therefore inequality of methods and incentives that different functional groups have in the economy,and by consequence the incentives of the political groups that represent them.
As Kahneman argues, people fight MUCH harder to prevent involuntary transfers than they do for their own reward. This behavior MANDATES that the four major schools, each of whom represent four groups, who represent four periodicities of human planning, conduct processes of voluntary exchange between the groups rather than attempt to support one ‘team’ winning.
For this reason I find @karl’s position as well as @Richard’s position somewhat humorously hypocritical: a pot calling a kettle black. The methodology and incentives of WS are narrow and self serving, and the methodology of Keyensians is narrow and self serving.
I will be proven right in time — certainly more right than the Keynesians. I look at your group the way you look at wall street: myopic because of methodologically enforced ignorance, all of which is preceded by a cognitive bias, a cognitive bias which is the product of biology not wisdom. As is evidenced by your failure to grasp the principles of human cooperation that are common sense to conservatives. The conservatives are offering compromises, and have been consistently (DOE and HUD). And you don’t want to pay those compromises, so you fit and fuss over creating a distraction to avoid the fact that you just want what you want regardless of the costs to others.
THE PROBLEM IS YOU, NOT WALL STREET, BUT YOU.
THE PROBLEM IS YOU.
You’re supposed to be smart. Try to be.
Otherwise, if possessed of this knowledge you are just another person seeking involuntary transfers from others under the pretense that outcomes are kaliedic. But they are only kaliedic because of your ignorance. Ignorance others do not possess.
In that event, you are either just another fool or just another thief.
The question is whether you want to refrain from being both, and become a statesman instead.
We need some. Heck, one would do.
Cheers
Saturday ~ April 21st, 2012 at 9:40 am
Karl Smith
Curt, I understand your general point here but I am not even suggesting there is a “problem”
Put plainly the issue is that people are speaking about QE as if they believe something significant is happening, but I cannot make out what this is.
Saturday ~ April 21st, 2012 at 10:27 am
curtd59
Thanks Karl. They are justifying their sentiments with artificial reason — which is what human beings do. In other words, it’s not rational.
I know your Smithian thinking drives you.
It’s a beautiful thing.
Curt
Saturday ~ April 21st, 2012 at 6:53 pm
bpabbott
I would guess that large financial institutions have access to low (near zero) interest loans from the FED and that they divert a large amount to the stock market. As long as cash flow into the market is positive everyone will look look like sages.
Sunday ~ April 22nd, 2012 at 3:04 pm
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[...] We Talk About When We Talk About QE Karl Smith is bemused; in two posts he asks what Wall Street thinks quantitative easing does, and apparently is getting a lot of [...]