Archive - May 1, 2011

Just because 1,000,000,000,000.00 is so 2011, Japan brings you 1,000,000,000,000,000.00 just in time for 2012.

While it will not surprise anyone that Japan, which for the past 3 decades has been a monetary policy basket case caught in what bankers like calling a deflationary spiral (yet which others like Sean Corrigan merely define as prices re-indexing to a fair value absent endless cheap credit crutches), has constantly had to resort to a record loose monetary policy coupled with endless episodes of quantitative easing, some may not know that over the past month Japan has seen its current account balance swell by $250 billion, or nearly half the entire Fed QE2 monetization mandate. And as the BOJ continues to disclose the full extent of the Japanese economic devastation following March 11, we are confident that very soon the most recent episode of Japanese “printing” will surpass the $600 billion that the Fed is injecting into the US economy (in addition to the roughly $250 billion in Treasury bonds monetized by the BOJ each year): an amount roughly 5 times greater than America's when expressed as a ratio of GDP. It is thus no surprise then that Bernanke does not seem too concerned with the purported end of QE – after all money printing is merely moving from developed world point A to developed world point B. And thanks to monetary linkages of “globalization” all this brand new money will once again find its way into speculative assets, and thus, Fed mandate #3 favorite - Russell 2000. Below we provide a closer look at what exactly the current and future, Japanese QEasing will look like.