Jan

22

QEe, from David Lillienfeld

January 22, 2015 |

QEe (QE euro) seems to be moving forward. So why did gold, which has had some strength over the past month, not budge at the news the way currencies did?

anonymous writes: 

The theory I am working on in my head and was hoping to have time to write about tonight is as follows:

QE depends upon a central bank "cartel" all agreeing to do it in unison and or in staggered phases. The cartel allows them to get away with this absurd policy without immediately wrecking the currency as compared to other currencies they don't seem to be devaluing.

Switzerland broke the cartel.

This means that the future of QE is in fact in jeopardy and will be more limited than otherwise.

anonymous writes: 

Isn't that the path off all cartels of > 1 players (Debeers),

Look at OPEC post 1974.

Like the prisoner's dilemma, the "cartel participant," game would call for a certain, upside price where the first member jumps ship, with a phony justification for their greed trumping the purpose of the cartel.

anonymous replies: 

Yes of course. Only in this case instead of restricting the supply, the deal was to expand the supply.

In the old days when Kuwait broke from the cartel and cheated it brought oil down more than just by the amount of Kuwait's extra production because once one member of the cartel cheats everyone else is going to.

It's the same thing here. Once SNB broke, others will be tempted to as well.

This isn't talked about in the press because of the insane and incorrect notion that your currency going up is somehow a bad thing, so the mainstream all think that the Swiss are somehow hurting themselves.

Alston Mabry writes: 

But the alt version is that they weren't playing along because their EUR purchases were putting upward pressure on EUR, counter to ECB's strategy.

anonymous replies: 

What ECB, US, and Japan would have wanted is for the SNB to devalue along with them. SNB wasn't going to do that.

Now, all of QE depends on the big lie that you are not really printing money and not really devaluing the currency.

Any time someone says "you're printing money" the response is met with "you just don't understand" followed by a description of the complicated process of QE and how it's not really printing money.

But the fallback position for the QE'ers is "look, there's no inflation (no consumer inflation.. it's in assets) and "the currency isn't being devalued".

The SNB's peg kept the ECB being able to claim they weren't destroying the currency. The SNB undoing of the peg reveals that the emperor has no clothes and they are, in fact, going to destroy the currency.

Alston Mabry responds: 

It may be true that claims were made about the EUR on the basis of the CHF cross. But I find compelling the narrative that Mario called up Thomas Jordan and said "look, unless you're willing to print tens of B of extra SFrs a month, you're not gonna be able to keep up." And Jordan, knowing that technically the SNB could do it but politically internally couldn't, said "you're right" and they dropped the cap. 


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