"Quantitative easing (QE)" is an ugly name for an important task: the need to make monetary policy effective when interest rates are close to zero. The world's leading central banks, including the Bank of England, have taken such actions. But is UK policy working? Yes, but not quite enough. The argument about quantitative easing is polarized: some critics wail about inflationary "money printing"; others complain that too little attention is paid to the flow of credit. Of the two camps, the latter is the more persuasive. At its simplest, as Charles Bean, the Bank's deputy governor, has explained, the Bank uses newly created money to purchase assets. Hitherto, the UK's QE has amounted to £200bn ($274bn), mainly used to purchase government bonds. The new money, in turn, ends up as bank reserves at the Bank. ... As Mr. Wilkes also argues, in today's exceptional circumstances, the Bank could usefully buttress its inflation target with a medium-term objective for nominal demand. Then, if QE has to be restarted, the Bank could use such a framework to explain why. Desperate times need desperate measures. The times are not over. Nor, therefore, are the measures. – Financial Times

Dominant Social Theme: It's a really good idea and it works.

Free-Market Analysis: This editorial in the Financial Times from March 7, 2010, excerpted above, is a tiny little yelp from the power elite, in our opinion. Maybe, just maybe, the ruckus over so much central bank money printing is beginning to reach the ears of those who actually create the money – even in the rarified heights of British high finance. Here's the telling phrase: "The argument about quantitative easing is polarized: some critics wail about inflationary 'money printing'; others complain that too little attention is paid to the flow of credit."

Editor's note: Mike Scotti served as a U.S. Marine in Afghanistan in 2001 and Iraq in 2003, and is a founding board member of Reserve Aid, a military-themed, nonprofit charity. He is the founder of the Military Veterans Club at the NYU Stern School of Business and is the subject of the documentary film "Severe Clear," which opens in New York on Friday. ... "A few days after I had returned from a six-month deployment to Iraq, my second sojourn in the Middle East since 2001, I remember feeling like I was an alien creature from some other planet. It was 2003, and I was attending a friend's wedding. As I sat at the table listening to the conversation, I suddenly realized that someone who had never been in combat could never even remotely understand what I had just been through. I looked around. The chamber music quartet, the beautiful bridesmaids, the steak dinner ... none of it was real. My buddies were, at that moment, probably on patrol and quite possibly engaged with the enemy. That was real. And as for the other guests at the table who were staring at me in my dress blues, we were no longer even the same species." – CNN

Dominant Social Theme: The loneliness and alienation is real.

Free-Market Analysis: We found the article, excerpted above, to be most sad, though our collective hats are off to Mike Scotti for the good work he is trying to do in helping vets readapt to civilian life. We cannot tell what Scotti thinks of the war efforts in Afghanistan or Iraq, but certainly his pain is real and shared by thousands who find it hard to live in a peaceful society after the stresses of war. While the article itself was interesting, if sad, the commentary beneath the article was just as enlightening in our opinion. Two feedbacks stood out, and we reproduce them below:

Forget gold and focus on its producers ... In December, I was told that China had appointed an agent in London to buy up every ounce of gold they could find. It was too incredible to believe. When speculation gets this hard to swallow it's a certain sign that a market is hitting a top. Today's news suggests it was another fantasy from the legion of gold bugs. The man in charge of China's $2.4 trillion of foreign-exchange reserves said that the yellow metal is unlikely to be a 'primary investment' as it diversifies. So the argument beloved of gold bugs that China will move to severely reduce the dollar as its reserve currency in favour of gold has been shot down. But that doesn't mean you should not have exposure to the yellow metal – quite the contrary. Gold is a key part of any portfolio. For now, it's not a good idea to buy into the metal directly, but instead to invest in gold companies that look set for strong production growth in the next few years. – UK Telegraph

Dominant Social Theme: Gold is bad, but gold producers are good, especially Barrick.

Free-Market Analysis: The logic of this article is a bit puzzling to us. The author, Garry White, describes himself this way: "As editor of the Questor column, I'm the Telegraph's share tipster, as well as its mining correspondent. I believe stock market investing is easy - all you have to do is look at trends in the world around you [and then] employ common sense. I'm particularly interested in commodities and the effect population growth will have on demand for life's basics such as food and water over time."

Legend has it that when Cortes landed in Mexico in the 1500s, he ordered his men to burn the ships that had brought them there to remove the possibility of doing anything other than going forward into the unknown. Marc Andreessen has the same advice for old media companies: "Burn the boats." Yesterday, Andreessen was in New York City and we met up. We got to talking about how media companies are handling the digital disruption of the Internet when he brought up the Cortes analogy. In particular, he was talking about print media such as newspapers and magazines, and his longstanding recommendation that they should shut down their print editions and embrace the Web wholeheartedly. "You gotta burn the boats," he told me, "you gotta commit." His point is that if traditional media companies don't burn their own boats, somebody else will. – TechCrunch

Dominant Social Theme: You will do better and make more money when you adapt to the Internet. Jump in!

Free-Market Analysis: This is a very interesting article at TechCrunch that we have excerpted above. Marc Andreessen is an amazingly bright mind, obviously a genius of sorts, and the inventor of the world's first web browser back in 1993. His perception that the mainstream media is stuck in an old-fashioned paper-and-print rut runs parallel to our own perceptions that the mainstream media is having a difficult time adapting to the Internet even now. Here's what Wikipedia had to say about Andreessen:

In a famous essay, published in the July 27 2009, issue of Newsweek magazine, the late Senator Ted Kennedy reiterated a message with which he has come to be very closely associated. As he wrote in that essay, "This is the cause of my life. It is a key reason that I defied my illness last summer to speak at the Democratic convention in Denver - to support Barack Obama, but also to make sure, as I said, 'that we will break the old gridlock and guarantee that every American...will have decent, quality health care as a fundamental right and not just a privilege.' For four decades I have carried this cause - from the floor of the United States Senate to every part of this country. It has never been merely a question of policy; it goes to the heart of my belief in a just society. Now the issue has more meaning for me – and more urgency – than ever before. But it's always been deeply personal, because the importance of health care has been a recurrent lesson throughout most of my 77 years."

The idea that health care and other welfare measures are fundamental rights everyone has goes back a couple of centuries. I believe it was the English philosopher T. H. Green who first articulated it (in his "Lecture on Liberal Legislation and Freedom of Contract"):

We shall probably all agree that freedom, rightly understood, is the greatest of blessings; that its attainment is the true end of all our efforts as citizens. But when we thus speak of freedom, we should consider carefully what we mean by it. We do not mean merely freedom from restraint or compulsion. We do not mean merely freedom to do as we like irrespective of what it is that we like. We do not mean a freedom that can be enjoyed by one man or one set of men at the cost of a loss of freedom to others. ...