Quantitative Easing Isn't The Devil

I'm growing increasingly irate at some of the descriptions of Quantitative Easing I've read in the blogosphere recently.  Meg Marco of Consumerist, a site I love and read daily (but let's not pretend that it isn't just another outrage blog), describes it as:

1) A bank has something they don't want to sell because nobody is paying enough.
2) The Fed is like, hey, how about we buy that off you for a little bit more than market price.
3) The bank is like, yeah cool.
4) The Fed credits the bank's account with money that it creates.

This is ostensibly correct, though it's missing some context I'll fill in below.  The tone of Meg's article is skeptical, and naturally it provides a nice venue for Consumerist's outrage brigade to vent about printing money = inflation in the comments.

This article from NPR explaining QE is just as vapid, summarizing it as "It means creating massive amounts of money out of thin air with the hope of getting the economy back on track."  Matt Taibbi does a pretty good job of comparing it to Zimbabwe's monetary policy while also taking his requisite shots at Wall Street fat cats.

Here's QE in my nutshell:  The government wants to encourage private lending to spur the economy.  One way to encourage lending is to lower the interest rate it charges banks to borrow money from the Fed, who in turn will borrow more money and then lend it out to private consumers, who presumably use it to open businesses and buy durable goods and etc.  Because that "discount" rate is already 0.75%, it can't reasonably go much lower.  Instead, what the Fed can do is make up imaginary money in a special account and buy up fixed assets from banks.  QE is targeted at particularly unsavory assets (think CMOs and other collateralized debt vehicles), and gives banks a ton of cashmoney, which they then will (in theory) lend out.  Unlike other similar programs, like TARP and Hoover's RFC, this isn't a budgeted expense.

Is it printing money to feed into the economy?  Technically yes.  Why isn't this a huge problem?

Because it's what the Fed does every single goddamn day.  The government tracks the difference between the target Fed funds rate (the interest rate banks charge each other for overnight lending to meet reserve requirements) and the actual Fed fund rate and conducts Open Market Operations to guide the actual rate towards the target.  It happens literally every day.  Sometimes the Fed makes up imaginary money to feed to banks to increase the money supply.  Other times (and this is important) they take that money back off the market by selling whatever security they originally purchased.  This is the minor daily mechanism for monitoring and adjusting interest rates, compared to the major big stick of the eight yearly meetings to discuss adjusting the discount and target Fed funds rates.

QE isn't a Zimbabwe-style money-printing inflation-causing apocalypse because after the Fed sends a few billion dollars to their favorite banks, they end up sitting on a massive pile of interest-bearing debt securities that 1) make money (unless the security collapses due to bankruptcy or foreclosures) and 2) will later be sold back to the market, when the investment climate is better, for close to the premium they paid in the first place.  In terms of the long term monetary supply it's essentially neutral.

In the short term, yes, it might cause a mild uptick in inflation (hence the article about TIPS Fever yesterday from the Times), but in five or six years when the Fed starts selling off its billions of dollars of holdings, it will suppress inflation.  It's not fundamentally different from how the government has been handling its monetary policy for decades.  It's not the end of the world.  There are times and places for uninformed outrage at government policy, but this isn't one of them.