Today I was planning on a post about Quantitative Easing (QE) today, because it seemed to me that it would never work. However, today, Randy Wray beat me to it with another great post, this time at ND20, reviewing the whole situation in detail, placing it in political context, and explaining why it’s very unlikely that it will allow the economy to recover much more than it has already. Here are some key quotes from Randy’s piece.

On Friday, the Government reported its 2010 Fiscal Year results. Here are some fragments from a “news” article in WaPo by Vincent Del Giudice.

The U.S. government posted its second straight annual budget deficit in excess of $1 trillion as lingering unemployment constrained tax revenue.

The shortfall totaled $1.294 trillion in the fiscal year ended Sept. 30, second only to the $1.416 trillion deficit in 2009, the Treasury Department said today in Washington. . . .

Mike Whitney ruminates over what the Fed intends to do in the near-future and what effects its actions will have on the world economy in the short-term. I then identify a few depressing consequences that can be inferred from Whitney’s analysis.

Bernanke’s zero bound is bubbling away

Charles Ferguson has made a documentary that must be seen if you want to understand why the same people who let the housing bubble and the 2008 financial meltdown happen are still in charge. But if you can’t go out and see Inside Job right away (it opened in New York and Los Angeles Friday), read Ferguson’s article, “Larry Summers and the Subversion of Economics,” summarizing his case in the Chronicle of Higher Education.

This is unsurprising. The primary journal of Versailles Media, Kaplan Test Prep Daily (the Washington Post, kept aloft by its for-profit education parent) backs Alan Simpson’s play on Social Security. Sure, he’s ‘brash,’ ‘colorful,’ and ‘intemperate.’ According to the WaPo. What the editorial overlooks is his ignorance: Simpson is wrong about Social Security’s solvency.

Contrast of economic cheerleaders Geithner and Bernanke versus the reality faced by long term un and underemployed workers

Financial reform is now the law of the land. Let’s make it meaningful and end our support of Wall Street.

While Ben Bernanke dreams of being the uber-regulator and chief monitor of systemic risk, a new agreement between the FDIC and other banking regulators like the Fed allows the FDIC to have independent direct access to big banks instead of making the FDIC to rely on his tame stable of regulators at the Fed.

Chalk one up for real oversight.

The G20 has dropped its support for fiscal expansion. The deficit hawks are prevailing. But why is that? We all either know or should know that operationally Federal spending is not constrained by revenues, as Chairman Bernanke stated last year, when asked on ’60 Minutes’ by Scott Pelley where the funds given to the banks came from:

“…we simply use the computer to mark up the size of the account that they have with the Fed.”

We know that when the Fed spends on behalf of the Treasury it simply credits a member bank or foreign government’s reserve account at the Fed.