Last autumn the chairman of the US Federal Reserve, Ben Bernanke, ended months of speculation about whether there would be another round of quantitative easing – the policy of buying up securities from banks so that more money is injected into the financial system. The idea has been that this will get them lending more and powering a recovery. Since the first two rounds had patently failed to generate recovery, he now announced a QE3 with a difference: not only did he announce QE3, its sheer scale and boundlessness made it a veritable QE infinity. The Fed would continue buying up mortgage-backed securities to the tune of $40bn a month until the labour market improved and would keep interest rates to their current near-zero levels until unemployment fell below 6.5%.
