When Quantitative Easing Finally Fails

While markets await details on the next round of quantitative easing (QE) — whether refreshed bond buying from the Fed or sovereign debt buying from the European Central Bank (ECB) — it’s important to ask, What can we expect from further heroic attempts to reflate the OECD economies?

The 2009 and 2010 QE programs from the Fed, and the 2011 operations from the ECB, were intended as shock treatment to hopefully set economies on a more typical, post-recession, recovery pathway. Here in 2012, QE was supposed to be well behind us. Instead, parts of Southern Europe are in outright depression, the United Kingdom is in double-dip recession, and the US is sweltering through its weakest “recovery” since the Great Depression.

It wasn’t supposed to be this way.

Recently-released data from all these regions now confirm that previous QE, at best, merely bought time against even more grueling outcomes. Spain’s unemployment, for example, has just hit a new post-Franco high of 24.6%, and the forecast for this crucially important EU economy remains negative. Recently revised US figures on GDP show that the post-2009 recovery was even weaker than previously estimated, with the first year post-crisis crisis clocking in at 2.5% vs. the expected 3.3%.

Plodding, slow growth in the aftermath of a global financial crisis is a recipe for stagnation. The inability of the US economy to work off its surplus of labor appears to have finally stirred OECD policymakers into action. This is, of course, a great and humbling disappointment to the recoverists, who keep mistaking various economic oscillations around a bottom for the start of a typical post-war, V-shaped recovery. Housing, autos, jobs, Internet IPOs, state tax revenues, and train traffic have all been called upon by optimists to sound the clarion call for a broad economic recovery. Yet the US economy still is only able to produce sector-specific or selected regional strength that never adds up to quite enough to restore national growth.

When we look at national GDP, at 1.5% in the most recent quarter, it is not clear the US economy has enough forward speed to statistically distinguish between slow growth and no growth. Large states like California, for example, are already seeing the return of declining state revenues. Meanwhile, national poverty — one of the best measures of aggregate economic health — continues to soar.

There is no doubt that any new round of QE — especially a double shot from both the Fed and the ECB — will have psychological impact. For Europe, QE would once again allay systemic risk. And for the US, QE will surely find its way to the stock market; which is not an insignificant outcome as America increasingly relies on the stock market to produce retirement income. However, the question arises, What series of radical measures policy makers will turn to after the next round of QE wears off?

Before we answer that question, let’s review the poor economic conditions leading to the next (and final) round of QE.

Housing

House prices in the US have done an excellent job of adjusting downward over the past 5 years to reflect the stagnation in US wages, the overhang of private debt, structural unemployment, and the rising cost of energy.

But there has been a recent media celebration of sorts over this story, as it now appears that housing is bottoming. To be sure, certain housing markets like Miami and Las Vegas continue to recover from completely bombed-out levels. Additionally, construction of new homes, especially multi-family homes, is off the bottom. For now.

The problem is that housing is a result, not a cause, of economic expansion. And unless housing is to work in tandem with wage and job growth, housing alone cannot power the US economy. Did the US not already learn that lesson already over the past decade?

Let’s take a look at fifteen years of home prices, from the US Census Bureau:

The unsustainable peak in 2006, when single-family homes reached a median sales price of $222,000, marked a near-doubling of price over the ten-year period from 1995. But as we now understand, not only were wages (in real terms) not rising during this period, but a new bull market in commodities was getting underway, robbing Americans of discretionary income.

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