Randy Wray — Flash From the Past: Why QE2 Wouldn’t Save Our Sinking Ship

Here’s a piece I published in HuffPost back on Oct 18, 2010. A flash from the past–three years ago–predicting that QE2 would prove to be as impotent as QE1 had been. And here we are, folks. No recovery in sight–at least once you get off Wall Street.

We’re now set–yet again–to go off the fiscal cliff. Some have begun to talk again of the Trillion Dollar Coin–an idea President Obama has again rejected. He fears it would get tied up in the courts. So what? That would take years to settle.

Or perhaps he doesn’t want to break the logjam. Politically, he’s winning while the Republicans self-destruct.

However, here’s a better idea. We’ve got museums and national parks shut down. Why not sell them to the Fed? We can find a few trillion dollars of Federal Government assets to sell–and the Treasury can pay down enough debt to postpone hitting the debt limit for years. Heck, if we run out of Parks and Recreation facilities to sell, why not start have the Fed start buying up National Defense? How much are our Nukes worth? That should provide enough spending room to keep the Deficit Hawk Republicans and Democrats happy for a decade or two.

Economonitor — Great Leap Forward
Flash From the Past: Why QE2 Wouldn’t Save Our Sinking Ship
L. Randall Wray | Professor of Economics, UMKC