By Pam Martens and Russ Martens: October 14, 2014
Yes, there is a wall of worry that the stock market is no longer climbing but is now descending. The greatest worry, that makes all others pale in comparison, is that the U.S. central bank, the Federal Reserve, has nothing left in its monetary arsenal but one bullet – Fed-Speak, otherwise known as spin.
After three bond buying programs known as Quantitative Easing (QE) flooded Wall Street with bountiful amounts of play money while failing to significantly lift wages or economic growth, the U.S. central bank now has a balance sheet that has quadrupled since the 2008 crisis to $4.4 trillion. That it would be allowed to engage in QE4 in the next crisis is highly doubtful since QEs have proven to be financial bubble makers, income inequality makers and of little help to the average citizen.
Equally problematic, the Fed is already at the zero-bound range in interest rates with no bullets left to fire in that arena as the specter of deflation begins to emerge around the globe.
There is a growing reappraisal on Wall Street as to what the Fed was really attempting to do with all this talk of the potential for a rate hike next year. Was it simply attempting to reload monetary bullets into its empty gun?
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