Team Quantitative Easing: Welcome to Your "New Normal," Please Ignore the Financial Bloodbath to Your Right

tHE nEW "nORMAL"

Posted: 26 May 2009 11:19 PM PDT


My translation of Bloomberg's "New Normal" is that it is a thinly-veiled attempt to convince you that your new reality is here to stay so you might as well get used to it. Is there an alternate interpretation to this that I may have missed? Please let me know.

May 26 (Bloomberg) -- Americans may have to get used to unemployment greater than 8 percent for the first time since 1983 and an economy that won’t grow much beyond 2 percent as a consequence of the lost confidence in consumer credit that shattered financial markets.

By this time next year, “the market will realize that potential growth for the U.S. is no longer 3 percent, but is 2 percent or under,” Mohamed El-Erian, chief executive officer of Pacific Investment Management Co., said in an interview with Bloomberg Radio.

“We are transitioning to what we call at Pimco a new normal,” El-Erian said. Pimco, in Newport Beach, California, is the biggest bond fund manager with about $756 billion in assets.

Thank you, Pimco, for your $0.02.

LOL Fed can paint a fairer picture of Pimco than I (via March 26th 2009's epic - PIMCO: We Can Haz Moar QE?):


Much like I would like a pony, a small island and other things that would require me to print currency in order to procure them, PIMCO would like the Fed to at least double its already burgeoning balance sheet. This from PIMCO’s top man in Asia:

Bond giant Pacific Investment Management Co said the Federal Reserve needs to double its balance sheet up to $6 trillion to replace the amount of wealth destroyed in the United States, an executive said on Thursday.

Liabilities on the Fed’s balance sheet should rise to between $5 trillion and $6 trillion later this year amid the financial crisis that roiled global markets, said Brian Baker, chief executive Pimco Asia Ltd.

“Right now, the Fed has spent about $3 trillion. We believe there has to be further stimulus policies put in place,” Baker told Reuters.

Also, PIMCO is apparently a big believer in the “too big to fail” theory, if you look at their investments:

Pimco’s chief investment officer Bill Gross is one of the industry’s most widely watched figures. Pimco is buying high-yield bonds in some U.S. banks that have received government support.

“We are investing in Citibank. We are investing in Bank of America. Those are, we believe, national champion banks or financial institutions that will survive,” he said.

So thank you, Pimco, for trying to define Bizarro World as "the new normal" but please get in the position to kiss my pristine backside. That's your reality, not mine.

Did any of the people on Greenspan's Body Count consider this normal? What about acting Freddie Mac CFO David Kellermann, did he find this normal? Do the nearly 7 million Americans out of work (government-reported numbers, of course, skewed beyond belief) as a result of this "new normal" find it to be normal?

I didn't think so. Pimco and the rest of them can keep their normal, thanks, I'd even take the old one back over their version.