Quantitative Easing: Economic Suicide Pill

NEW YORK (TheStreet) -- The question being asked all across the world of business news is: Will QE2 be successful? Because this policy is literally economic suicide, the question becomes: Will the Federal Reserve be successful in the assisted economic suicide of the U.S. government? I find this an utterly appalling question -- which highlights the intellectual bankruptcy of government policymakers and the bankers who goad them onward.

Quantitative easing is nothing more than a euphemism for printing money out of thin air. Its one-and-only purpose is to destroy the currency being printed. It is pure dilution and absolutely no different than a corporation vowing to improve its fiscal performance simply by printing a lot of new shares.

We can illustrate the inherently evil nature of this monetary abomination by working through the "mechanics" of this policy. First, the explicit goal of QE2 is to increase inflation. By now, all readers should be familiar enough about "inflation" to know that it is literally nothing more than the speed with which our currencies are being destroyed.

In the case of the Federal Reserve, we understand all too well how "successful" it has been in creating inflation. Since it was invented in 1913, the Federal Reserve has been directly responsible for the U.S. dollar losing 97% of its value (i.e. inflation has raised prices by more than 20 times what they were in 1913) -- despite the official mandate of the Federal Reserve for "price stability" (i.e. protecting the dollar). Now, Ben Bernanke is vowing to "succeed" in destroying the remaining 3% of value of the world's reserve currency.

Here is how printing money accomplishes Bernanke's "goal." First of all, as with any kind of dilution, printing new dollars makes all of the "old" dollars worthless. So, right there, the Federal Reserve is already 100% guaranteed of "success. In fact, the Federal Reserve has already been "very successful" in creating inflation -- in the real world.

Visit Shadowstats.com, operated by respected U.S. economist John Williams, and you will hear that U.S. inflation has been in the range of 8.5% - 9.5% all this year. Williams performs his calculations using the exact same methodology used by the U.S. government a generation ago, before the U.S. government intentionally incorporated various statistical lies into this measurement.

Understand the enormous "rewards" which a government receives for lying, by grossly under-stating the rate of inflation. Payouts on $100's of billions of U.S. government benefits per year are indexed to the rate of "official" inflation. By grossly understating inflation (and cheating all of the recipients of those benefits), the U.S. government can get an instant, multibillion dollar windfall from that one lie, alone (every year).