Wellington Denahan, CEO of mortgage REIT Annaly Capital [NLY] came out swinging in the investor conference call after reporting earnings yesterday.
Citing a recent report from the IMF, the outspoken exective railed against quantitative easing and the zero interest rate policy as working only to the detriment of average Americans.
In other words, if the folks at the Federal Reserve (she specifically names chair Janet Yellen and predecessor Ben Bernanke) are trying to improve the economic conditions of the average American — that is to say, most of us — then they unequivocally failed and only made matters worse in the long run.
“Despite their noble efforts, I believe policymakers have failed to foster the conditions for a credible sustained recovery,” he said. “They have, however, been very successful in creating both debt and equity market bubbles, however reliant they may be on zero interest rates.”
But then he lays it on the line:
"Since 2009 when the experiment began, global bond markets have increased in value by roughly $17 trillion, or the size of the U.S. economy, while global equity markets have increased in value by a staggering $40 trillion. Yet the American wage earners have gained a relatively paltry $722 billion in comparison during the same period. Or to put it more clearly, for every dollar gained by the American worker, the global equity markets have gained $55."
The bombshell came to my attention in an email from Brent Nyitray, director of Capital Markets, iServe Residential Lending, who had this to add.
“As much as people complain about inequality, almost nobody asks if Fed policy in general, not just QE, is behind the rising inequality as the Fed creates serial bubbles,” Nyitray writes.
“The left loves to point out that inequality began accelerating in 1979 (in order to blame it all on Reagan), however the dual mandate began right around that time as well, and as such began the mother of all rallies in stocks, bonds, and real estate.”
So all this harkens back to why the Federal Reserve started the dual mandate in the first place.
Speaking toward the end of his tenure, Bernanke argued that the dual mandate could almost be seen as one policy, based on the benefical results to unemployment and inflation. And that this one policy is effective.
"It is our sense that the dual mandate has served us well here. In particular that the Fed has been able at times to speed the recovery from recession and help put people back to work more quickly," Bernanke said.
[See also, Zero Hedge, What QE hath wrought in 8 stunning charts.]
Now, Denahan argues that despite getting jobs back, what good was it all? The American workers never got their fair take on this deal, any way you look at it.
That’s true Denahan, but there is a bright side.
In the same talk where he defended the dual mandate, Bernanke said, “we have done everything we can think of essentially to strengthen the Fed's ability to monitor the financial markets to take actions to stabilize the economy in the financial system.” (italics, mine.)
So, hopefully the CEO feels better knowing Fed policymakers would have gone further in their economic rescue attempts, if only they could have cooked up more economic concoctions.
Lucky for us, they didn’t.
