The whole QE program MUST be inflationary. It don't make any rational sense that a government could just purchase trillions of dollars worth of it's own debt with synthetic money and not have some inflationary impact (your initial fear). So what then? How is that massive force just being absorbed with no consequence? I don't know, I don't think anyone knows. I could speculate. It's likely that in a global economy China's artificially devalued currency allows us to print money without real inflationary consequences for us? Could be the dollar has become the de facto world currency and with this much wider circulation the system can absorb much more inflationary pressure than previously thought. Could be that this system is controlled more by behavioral economics than economics. Maybe people just believe a dollar is worth about X and that's very sticky until it isn't. This last idea is the scariest. Our government is just like a big bank. The value of the dollar is subjective and I believe serious inflation won't come in an incremental fashion, it will come in a black swan tidal wave. I could be wrong and I seriously hope I am!! I just don't think it's prudent to say, well we all thought (rationally and rightly) QE was going to cause inflation because it's so obviously an aggressively inflationary policy... then since it didn't we just turn the page and say oh well... glad that didn't blow up the dollar. We need to understand why that didn't have an effect.