Friday, November 25, 2011

Should the Fed bail out Europe?

This is just a thought experiment. What if the Fed bought up 200 billion Euros, and then bought up Italian or French debt? The purchase of the Euros would weaken the dollar slightly which would be good for US economy. And the purchase of the bonds would help stabilize Europe.

See also: http://www.zerohedge.com/news/will-fed-buy-efsf-bonds

"The EFSF should announce bonds sales to the Fed.  The Fed should purchase 200 billion Eur of EFSF bonds today.  They should commit to further purchases of 100 billion in Q1 and Q2 next year.  The Fed has been dying to do some quantitative easing and has been looking for a liquidity crisis in need of some liquidity.  It has also been looking (quietly) for ways to keep the dollar weaker."

See also: http://www.telegraph.co.uk/finance/comment/ambroseevans_pritchard/8918784/Should-the-Fed-save-Europe-from-disaster.html

"The Fed can inject money into the economy in still other ways. For example, the Fed has the authority to buy foreign government debt. Potentially, this class of assets offers huge scope for Fed operations," he [Bernanke] said.
Berkeley’s Brad DeLong said it is time for Bernanke to act on this as the world lurches straight into 1931 and a Great Depression II. “The Federal Reserve needs to buy up every single European bond owned by every single American financial institution for cash,” he said.
The Fed could buy €2 trillion of EMU debt or more, intervening with crushing power. The credible threat of such action by the world’s paramount monetary force might alone bring Italian and Spanish yields back down below 5pc, before one bent nickel is even spent.

And yet another article saying the same thing:
http://www.aljazeera.com/indepth/opinion/2011/11/20111128143150223756.html
"Fortunately, the Fed has the tools needed to prevent this sort of meltdown. It can simply take the steps that the ECB has failed to do. First, and most importantly, it has to guarantee the sovereign debt of eurozone countries. The Fed simply has to commit to keep the interest rate yields on debt from rising above levels where it risks creating a self-perpetuating spiral of higher debt leading to higher interest rates, which in turn raises the deficit and debt."

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