The Fed Is So Over Quantitative Easing

The Fed's quantitative easing program won't be a trilogy, at least for now, according to The Washington Post:

QE3 is not to be.That's the conclusion to be drawn from new minutes of the last Federal Reserve policy meeting released Wednesday afternoon. The central bank is on the verge of concluding its purchase of $600 billion in Treasury bonds. The program, known as QE2 because it is the Fed's second round of "quantitative easing," has been the Fed's tool for keeping short-term interest rates near zero to boost the nations' economy.

The minutes from the late April meeting show there is little appetite among Fed policymakers to launch a new round of bond purchases.

According to the minutes, some members of the Federal Open Market Committee said there "would need to be a significant change in the economic outlook, or the risks to that outlook, before another program of asset purchases would be warranted."

Without such changes, "the benefits of additional purchases would be unlikely to outweigh the costs," the minutes said.

A lot of folks thought that was true with the second round. And it turns out they were probably right: Last month, The New York Times reported that the consensus is that the benefits of QE2 were "surprisingly small." 

Lots more on Ben Bernanke's made-up money here.