Krugman is still looking for something good about QE2

This is his best, so far: There are actually multiple revelations in that article. For one thing, it attacks not just QE2, which was about to commence, but QE1 — the Fed’s intervention during the chaotic post-Lehman period — which is generally considered to have been quite effective. Their evidence to the contrary?

Let me help oput on QE2, which started Sept 2010. What happened? The ten year yield jumped, the blue line.  Inflation jumped, the red line. Then, early 2011 we almost had a double dip, the green line.

OK, so show your graph Krugman.

Then we have this claim by Stanley Ficsher of the Fed that QE lowered yields. Lets look:

 The red line is QE. The blue line is the ten year treasury. Anyone see where QE budged the blue line relative to trend? No, the blue line was headed down for 20 years, nothing that QE affected it except to raise it during the QE purchases.


Krugman claims he has the right to handwave because he and his pals went to some basket weaving school called MIT. Show us some chart that verifies QE2 and Ben Bernanke made sense. If the excuse was that Ben saved the pension funds by pumping the market, than say so; at least that is believable and verifiable. But the idea of framing all these moved to conform to some bonehead theory from basket weaving school does not cut it.