Conservatives Love QE2 Now?

From National Review:

QE2, though flawed, worked. It began to work even before being for­mally implemented.

Con­ser­v­a­tive politi­cians and con­ser­v­a­tive pun­dits none – the less blasted it. They seized on the rise in long-​​term inter­est rates as proof it was not stim­u­lat­ing the econ­omy: the pre­cise kind of con­fu­sion about the mean­ing of interest-​​rate changes that Fried­man had warned against. They blamed QE2 for a boom in com­modi­ties prices, largely ignor­ing the role of ris­ing Asian demand for those com­modi­ties. And they fret­ted about run­away infla­tion, even though, in the after­math of QE2, the spreads men­tioned above were fore­cast­ing infla­tion rates below 2 per­cent for years to come—a lower aver­age infla­tion rate than in each of the last five decades.

In warn­ing about infla­tion, con­ser­v­a­tives are cry­ing “fire” in, if not Noah’s flood, at least a tor­ren­tial rain.

Indeed.

22 March 2011 – 11:02 am | By Benjamin Daniels | Posted in Economics | Comments (168)