QE mulitplier

The surprising value of not tapering by Felix Salmon

I’m very late to this — I was a bit distracted by other things today — but the big storyline of the day seems clear: the Fed didn’t taper, and markets surged in response.

So here’s my question. If you take the amount of tapering that the market expected yesterday, and the amount of tapering that the market expects today, what’s the difference, in dollar terms? In other words, by the time tapering ends, and the Fed is no longer engaging in quantitative easing, how much extra money will it have spent buying bonds, if current market expectations hold, compared to what the market expected on Wednesday?

Then comes the next question, which is this: how much did the value of US fixed-income assets rise on Thursday? And, for that matter, how much did the value of US stocks rise on Thursday?

I don’t know the exact answers to the questions, but I’m pretty sure that the latter numbers are much larger than the former — that the market reaction, in dollar terms, was hugely greater than the extra amount of QE that the market now expects.

If that is indeed the case, then what we’re seeing is what you might call the QE multiplier — the amount by which every dollar of QE effects the markets as a whole. I don’t know what we thought the QE multiplier was on Wednesday, but in light of Thursday’s market action we might need to revise our guesses: the QE multiplier is, I suspect, much larger than most of us would have pegged it at.

And that, in turn, is surely a reason to keep on easing. If QE does no good, then you might as well not do it. But the lesson we learned on Thursday is that the markets really, really love QE. And insofar as robust markets feed through into a healthier economy, the logical conclusion is that we should retain current policy well into 2014. The downside is limited — and the upside is much bigger than we thought it was.

(via DeLong)