Photographer: Olivier Douliery/Bloomberg Photographer: Olivier Douliery/Bloomberg

The Fed's cure risks being worse than the disease

An alphabet soup of new asset-buying programs will essentially nationalize large swaths of the financial markets, and the consequences could be profound.

The Fed took unprecedented action to meet an unprecedented crisis. Is it dangerous?

The economic debate of the day centers on whether the cure of an economic shutdown is worse than the disease of the virus.  Similarly, we need to ask if the cure of the Federal Reserve getting so deeply into corporate bonds, asset-backed securities, commercial paper, and exchange-traded funds is worse than the disease seizing financial markets. It may be.

In just these past few weeks, the Fed has cut rates by 150 basis points to near zero and run through its entire 2008 crisis handbook. That wasn’t enough to calm markets, though — so the central bank also announced $1 trillion a day in repurchase agreements and unlimited quantitative easing, which includes a hard-to-understand $625 billion of bond buying a week going forward. At this rate, the Fed will own two-thirds of the Treasury market in a year.

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By Jim Bianco

Jim Bianco is the President and founder of Bianco Research, a provider of data-driven insights into the global economy and financial markets. He may have a stake in the areas he writes about.

Read more opinion Follow @biancoresearch on Twitter

(Source: bloomberg.com; March 27, 2020; https://is.gd/voM1RO)
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