There’s No ‘E’ So ‘Q’ Is Just Formal Imagination

It all started with Japan so it makes sense to start there. As anyone who wishes might know, the Bank of Japan has pioneered the QE business to the point beyond extrapolation. They were first to do it, first to “have” to expand it, and first to go back to it over and over and over. BoJ is on at least QE10 if not QE22 or even 23. When QQE was first launched in April 2013, in what seems like a distant and now dismal memory, they proclaimed righteous construction of hitting their 2% target in 2 years. Despite missing that target already and being “forced” to expand QQE once already (with whispers of still another haunting over everything), the Bank’s version of “transitory” will stretch yet another year. Their expectation for that 2% “inflation” rate has recently been pushed out to now 2017:

BOJ Governor Haruhiko Kuroda and his fellow board members said in a report detailing updated economic projections that the slide in oil prices was to blame for reduced consumer-price forecasts for the coming two years. The bank now sees the inflation target reached around the six-month period through March 2017. At the start of this year, the expectation was for the goal to be realized in the fiscal year through March 2016.

As in the US, oil prices have gained the most scorn though not all; and what remains apart from crude oil is meticulously avoided. Central banks all over the world are joined, even conjoined by the “dollar”, into pulling apart their mechanistic mysticism of inflation. The very term QE refers to exactly that connotation, as “quantitative” is meant to deliver the expectation of a scientific regimen. The central bank does X amount and produces a known Y view of inflation. Thus, the situation of doing X and X^2, as in Japan, and producing Yx0 is not just an economic setback (in orthodox views; in reality, inflation is most unwelcome even at such “low” rates) it obliterates the whole theory.

Since modern monetarism, fused and infused with Keynesian central planning elements, is entirely predicated on at least some parts of the Phillips Curve, being taken out of the QE “equation” by stubbornly ungovernable inflation is fatal to the whole damned philosophy. That observation includes a US Federal Reserve and its policymaking body, the FOMC, that had been well-versed in Japan’s prehistoric experimentation with “Q”E (not that the “E” comes closer to its billing, either). At their June 2003 policy meeting, where Greenspan’s ultra-low discussion dominated, Japan was a heavy topic for those obvious reasons.