Fed Decision Equivalent of Bush saying "I am losing in Iraq and I need to win a war somewhere

[Flabbergasted]

so I am going to launch nuclear strikes on Iran so I can go out a winner. Dick Cheney says it is a good idea so it must be."

http://www.commodityonline.com/news/topstory/newsdetails.php?id=2791

'Why I am shocked by Fed decision to cut rates'
By: Mike Swanson

If the Fed hadn't lowered interest by .50 basis points yesterday the market most likely would begin a correction by the end of this week that would bring it down to retest the August lows by the middle of October. The market most likely would have then made a double bottom and be geared up to up through the end of the year. If the Fed had to it could have even intervened again to force a bottom.

snip

The Fed is saying that it will now print money like mad to prevent any sort of market pullback of any kind and it doesn't care about the value of the dollar. The US Dollar index is trading below its 30 year support level and will eventually collapse if the Fed continues upon the course that it announced yesterday.

And he is sending a message that he is willing to do this.

I can think of only two reasons:

1)The problems in the mortgage markets are worse than we know and the entire banking system is bankrupt. In other words the mortgage securities that banks hold are worth nothing. The Fed in turn is going to print money and lower interest until housing prices go back up, so mortgage securities will rally, and if inflation explodes and the dollar becomes worthless it is worth the cost, because the banks must be saved. And the banks own the Fed.

or

2)Ben Bernanke has a PH.D in economics and is obsessed with the idea that the Fed caused the Great Depression, because it didn't lower interest rates fast enough. He's an academic who is putting the theories he learned as a young man to use.

That is essentially what Bernanke is. He wrote a thesis claiming that the Great Depression happened because the Fed didn't lower interest rates fast enough after the stock market topped out in 1929. I don't believe this at all, but to explain why is a subject left for another time. What is important though is that if you look at a chart of the stock market between 1929 and 1932 and look at what the Fed did you'll see that the Fed lowered interest shortly after the market topped out and continued to lower rates in the following years and the market fell anyway. Rates and the stock market fell together.

What this means though is ff you believe the Fed didn't lower rates interest fast enough as Bernanke does then you think the Fed should have lowered rates all at once instead of doing so as the market dropped.

It appears that Bernanke is putting that theory to test right now. At the very least he is trying to prevent the market from reaching phase two of this crisis, in which the extent of the subprime losses are revealed, by restoring the balance sheets of troubled hedge funds with a big stock market rally of his creation.

Based on Bernanke's Depression thesis it seems that he is going to lower rates dramatically and quickly over just a few months, because he believes that if he doesn't the banking system will collapse, the stock market will crash, we'll have a Depression or who knows what. In the end this probably won't make any bit of difference and will cause a hyperinflation of consumer prices and a collapse in the value of the dollar - and may not be even needed at all. He's fearing that the credit markets and banking problems justify such a course of action, but that isn't a 100% certainty. Maybe the problems aren't as bad as he fears. But we won't know that.

Instead a year from now if he continues this course we'll have a different set of problems - a dollar that has collapsed in value and eventually a huge spike in interest rates as foreign investors flee the dollar and the US government bond market.

[PDenton]

1. Either way, the economy is sick with stagflation

and primed to crash. Lowering rates is just going to keep the economy burning out a while longer. I think Bernake is hoping for a soft landing. I believe most economists are overly optimistic. There isn't alot left in the US to catch a falling economy.

[old guy]

2. Printing more money, lowering interest rates again,

trying to pump up the housing to stave off economic problems. I'm not an economic guru but it seems to me all they are doing is supplying more shovels to dig the hole deeper.