I generally as a rule dislike ZeroHedge, but there is good pertinent information in the following link. https://www.zerohedge.com/markets/944-trillion-reasons-why-f...
(Commence the downvotes.)
(Commence the downvotes.)
Edit: Then again, their articles sometimes feature near complete fabrications, i.e., "Minneapolis Fed president Neel Kashkari [...] said that it was time for the Fed to pick up where the USSR left off and start redistributing wealth", which is not even remotely close to what was actually said.
This is very wrong. The "evidence" they provide is nonexistent. The ZH link is typical ZH garbage. A bunch of assertions without basis with a few misconstrued quotes thrown in.
So not nonexistent. The quotes look completely fine (I have looked at clearinghouses quite a bit, Russel Clark understands them...obv, the guy is not an idiot).
Which was practice a weird form of state capitalism, where most corporate profits flowed into subsidizing the political class, the military, infrastructure, and a couple of really inefficient industries.
The government, of course, was adamant that this was just a temporary transition period, and that communism would be achieved soon - like, in a few decades. This 'transition period', of course, lasted nearly 70 years.
Just as easily as someone in software can bullshit their way through a presentation with a couple years cursory understanding of SWE topics, same goes with "researching" and writing a ZH econ article. ZH does not do meaningful economic analysis, look elsewhere.
At the end of the day, fiscal policy is extremely important, and almost no amount of monetary policy can do much on its own.
Unless we decide to start actually minting money, like the trillion dollar platinum coin idea.
Peter Thiel's hedge fund, Clarium Capital, lost huge amounts of money on such a bet.
https://www.chicagofed.org/~/media/publications/chicago-fed-...
https://www.federalreserve.gov/newsevents/files/other2019011...
Reflationary might be a better interpretation, since vast amounts of wealth were destroyed in 2008.
Earlier QE rounds (and this "not QE" round too) are definitely inflationary, but that inflation is not evenly distributed through the economy.
QE inflates prices of financial assets and related stuff. The further you get from financial assets, and the correspondingly closer you get to the real economy, the less inflation there is. Eg. equities get inflated a ton, housing prices less, the price of a hamburger not at all. The mechanism for this non-flat inflation distribution is straightforwardly derive-able just from supply-and-demand; they increase the supply of capital, but only by bidding up the prices of financial assets, while demand for those assets is approximately constant.
That said, you're right that Zerohedge ranges from "mostly-uninformed" to "intentionally writing nonsensical clickbait lies." On the other hand, it is broadly speaking not any wronger than e.g. what you see on TV or read in major newspapers.
The effects of QE become much more clear - since the price of a bond is now fixed above its market clearing price (alternately, rates are artificially pegged low), this actually results in a shortfall of supplied liquidity and a situation that sharply favors strong borrowers.
As a paranoid rag goes, ZH's faults are many and varied, but come on - the critique that the Federal Reserve doesn't know what the hell it's doing is 100% valid.
The observation that the FRB consistently bats 0.000 in economic outlook and interest rate forecasts (e.g. Bernanke calling housing subprime defaults "contained", or Yellen constantly stretching out the timeline of getting off zero, or Powell cutting rates three times in 2019 after predicting four hikes less than a year prior, or claiming repo operations would be unwound completely by 15 Jan) is absolutely correct, and an absolutely appropriate critique to make, even by armchair quarterbacks.
Just look at the history of FRB dot plots to get a view for how absurd your implied position is that bankers/economists are any better at their jobs than a drunk with darts and an interest rate chart would be.
HN is more aligned with ZH than not in the sense that it seems most on here believe the stock market is rigged or a bubble or otherwise not a sound investment.
For one thing HN doesn't allow ZeroHedge on the frontpage, it's banned from getting there. I suspect posted links to ZeroHedge get auto killed as well at this point (haven't checked lately, however it used to be the case).
It's considered a non-reputable source, filled with propaganda and comically absurd pessimism about the world ending every other day of the week (they've been wrong about the last ten years to such an extreme degree that they should shut down the entire site if they had a conscience). It also posts very pro-Russia propoganda on an almost daily basis. Their bias is interesting, although most sites have one; theirs just happens to be Russian in nature (not a great bias for an economic / business site, given Russia has no functioning market economy, a dictatorship, and has seen zero net economic growth for a decade plus).
Every great once in a while they post an article that is actually interesting, correct and outside of the normal channels of what the mainstream sites are willing to say. They publish a few of those per week, you have to dig through the trash to get to them.
It's got dutch disease, due to its oil reserves, with most of the economy focused on resource extraction (and the rest being the service sector), but that's still a market economy.
Mention the stock market and everyone screams bubble and casino on here.
I think HN shares some skepticism, but in general isn't quite as right leaning as ZH seems to be. I enjoy reading both for viewpoints along the entire political spectrum.