Bernanke Has At Most 5 Months In Which To Announce QE3

BottomsUp · January 2, 2011, 9:14pm

zerohedge.com/article/observ … -announce-

Observations On The Latest Debt “Inflection Point”, And Why Bernanke Has At Most 5 Months In Which To Announce QE3

Yesterday on Tom Keene’s always informative show, two of the world’s most important economists, Goldman’s Jan Hatzius and BofA’s Ethan Harris presented their respective defenses for why GDP in 2011 would rise by nearly 4% as per their recent predictions. The straw man for the upside case: recently adopted fiscal stimuli which, however as David Rosenberg notes, are not really stimuli as much as lack of governmental disstimuli. Yet what is interesting is that both ceded that both employment and housing, the two key traditional drivers of economic growth and prosperity, would likely continue deteriorating, with employment ending the year over 9%. In other words, all growth in 2011 will be predicated upon very much more of the same: transfer payments and government stimulus (not to mention inventory accumulation) especially in the form of incremental debt to offset consumer deleveraging. No surprise there. After all the only reason why the economists of the world have expressed an unprecedented amount of bullishness in recent months is that the US is currently experiencing a rare confluence of both fiscal and monetary stimulus: an even that last occurred in March of 2009. The issue is that as we have noted previously, the benefit from the fiscal stimulus has already been negated by the jump in oil and other commodity prices, whereby the token weekly paycheck increase has been more than offset by gas price increases, while the monetary stimulus is already priced in, and absent rumors of another episode of QE in advance of the June end of QE2, the temporary stock market strength will quickly turn into weakness. Which leaves us with the hangover effect of federal deficit… and its funding. The chart below presents some interesting observations in this regard, and also makes us wonder just what will happen to risk assets if Bernanke does not leak the announcement of QE3 by May at the very latest.

There is more.