Using The Correct Start Date Is Key

The former Federal Reserve Chairman doth protest too much, methinks. The answer to why Ben Bernanke is still defending QE is obvious. Had it worked, I mean really worked, he would be today universally hailed as the greatest monetary steward since Bagehot. Though he wrote a book trying to cast himself in that way, the rest of the world just isn’t seeing it, or buying it (which way Treasury yields?). Thus, he protests; a lot.

For QE to be debatable after so long and so much of it tells you everything you need to know about its effects. There were some, they think, but even proponents can’t really tell you with conclusive vigor what they were. Instead, as Bernanke writes in his latest paper, published in early October:

Consequently, disagreements remain among researchers about the magnitude and persistence of QE effects and about the relative importance of the two primary channels of effect.

Bernanke’s emotional insecurity is on full display with what he immediately writes after the sentence above. “Nevertheless, the strong view that QE is ineffective has been pretty decisively rejected.” By whom? If that was true Bernanke wouldn’t be writing this paper to defend the weakest of QE’s presumed positive effects.

If QE had worked as advertised, there would have been full recovery. Full stop. That didn’t happen, so Bernanke and all the rest of the world’s central bankers have enough sense not to really bother with holding themselves to their own prior standards. They now know, after enough time, they can’t.

Instead, what they are doing is trying to work backwards to find anything. QE didn’t create a full recovery, or a partial one, it didn’t lead to a breakout of inflation, or even behaved inflation conforming to explicit targets, but it must have done something, right? Absent second and third order effects, which is right where success would be, Bernanke is left to examine at least some first order stuff (and still, as noted above, there isn’t agreement as to how much good might have been done even here).