Might be more about politics than economics though:
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I predict its too little, too late.
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Can someone do a Quantitative Tightening for Dummies post, please? And, thank you.
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I read again and I still don’t get it. There has to be a simple way to explain it. Liz and Jillian, explain it to me, please.
Or just tell me that it is bad for the economy, and I will go away. I never understood the stock market thingie with the orange juice in “Trading Places” either, though Virgil explains it to me each time that we watched it.
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I don’t understand it, either, but I’ve heard Steve Cortez and Peter Navarro explain it enough times that I know its something the FED does to help reduce inflation.
Tightening is slowing the printing of money and Easing is printing more, I think. (But don’t quote me on that!)
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I don’t understand it. I suspect it means they will print less paper money. In which case it’s like putting a little bandage on a person dying of ebola.
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What does it have to do with selling assets?
Where’s Chauncey?
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Haha! Yes, where’s Chauncey when you need him? 
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Quantitative Easing (QE) is a relatively new policy that was introduced in the Western nations at the time of the 2008/9 financial crisis. In QE the government buys back its own debt (bonds), and other assets (apparently such as mortgage backed securities), with electronic money that it creates out of thin air. Critics of the policy describe it as electronic money printing, but the authorities try to claim it is a sophisticated new kind of policy that is not like printing cash (as happened in the Weimar Republic) because the money does not go immediately into circulation in the general population, so e.g. grocery prices do not immediately start to rise.
QE does however put more money into circulation in banks and other financial organizations which in theory is supposed to stimulate economic activity during a downturn. In practice QE seems to just enrich the richest people in society as the money seems to mostly be used by clever financiers to buy up assets, which drives up the price of assets (reversing the downturn in the house prices for one thing, creating the illusion of an economic boom). There doesn’t seem to be much evidence that QE really stimulates genuine economic activity, in fact I’m rather inclined to suspect it does the opposite, because it encourages non-productive financial activities - the financiers might otherwise be turning their attention to productive activities such as making cars etc. rather than speculating in assets and shares etc.
Quantitative Tightening is supposed to be the opposite of Quantitative Easing. This is where the government sells the bonds (and other assets) that it purchased in the QE program back into the bond market but once receiving the money it simply “destroys” the electronic money. The problem is that the bond market is a market, and prices fluctuate in markets, so when it buys its own bonds (in QE) and then later sells them back (in QT) it is not necessarily selling the bonds at the same price that it purchased them. Thus there are big opportunities for rich people to get even richer a second time around.
People should be very suspicious of all these financial shenanigans, because we know our whole system is deeply corrupt now, and it could be that this is just another mechanism to achieve the “you will own nothing” state of affairs that the WEF claims will make us happy. Remember also that BlackRock persuaded the Federal Reserve to launch a program called “Going Direct” which caused inflation and enriched BlackRock.
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My understanding is it’s actually reverse money printing i.e. effectively it destroys the money that was previously printed, see also my longer reply to Jeanne.
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Thanks! That took brain power!
I do know for sure that the system is deeply corrupt, as you say, and we need to end the FED.
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I’ve been thinking about QE quite a lot ever since they started the program, alarm bells starting ringing in my head the moment I first heard about it. Money printing does not solve economic problems IMHO, it causes them.
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Thanks, Chauncey! I kind of thought that it meant reining in all the “printed” money. And I can see how all that digital stuff (beware, beware) could work like that.
Actually, I knew what it was all along. I just wanted to see if anybody else did… 
Chauncey, I printed your explanation out, because it is so easily understood. Basically all the Q-Stuff is a scam and the Fed holds our economy in its money-grubbing hands. And the head of the Fed is always some ancient Peter-Principle advanced troll, isn’t it?
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