From Frances Coppola:
…the super-safe backstop offered to money funds by the Fed is only the latest in a long line of implicit government guarantees propping up the financial system. Far from ending government support of the financial system, the developments of recent years have actually made it MORE dependent on the state.
Markets, too, have become government-dependent. Markets watch central banks all the time, anticipating their actions and responding to their announcements. And exceptional monetary policy by central banks has impacted market functioning. QE reduced the supply of safe assets, raising their price, while the additional money flowing into markets as a result of QE blew up bubbles in various other classes of asset, both safe assets gold, commodities, fine art and above all real estate and high-yield assets. It is hard to say what market prices would be like now if no central bank were doing QE, and we are unlikely to find out any time soon: the US is withdrawing QE, but Japan is currently doing the largest QE programme it has ever done and the ECB may also soon be forced reluctantly to do some form of asset purchase programme. China has been doing yuan QE for a while, but if dollar liquidity becomes an issue it may be forced to repo out its USTs, which would reinforce the Fed’s ONRRPs and make control of dollar liquidity more difficult. And of course the Swiss have been quietly controlling the Swiss franc market for ages. To prevent the Swiss franc rising, they’ve done the largest QE programme in the world relative to the size of their economy….
Read more at Coppola Comment: Creeping nationalisation.