{"id":5386,"date":"2013-09-19T21:19:53","date_gmt":"2013-09-20T03:19:53","guid":{"rendered":"http:\/\/www.zmetro.com\/?p=5386"},"modified":"2013-09-19T21:19:53","modified_gmt":"2013-09-20T03:19:53","slug":"west%e2%80%99s-debt-explosion-is-real-story-behind-fed-qe-dance","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/www.zmetro.com\/?p=5386","title":{"rendered":"West\u2019s debt explosion is real story behind Fed QE dance"},"content":{"rendered":"<p><a href=\"http:\/\/www.ft.com\/intl\/cms\/s\/0\/76b6f332-2133-11e3-8aff-00144feab7de.html#axzz2f9gZn3tf\">Gillian Tett:<\/a><\/p>\n<blockquote><p>The danger with addictions is they tend to become increasingly complusive. That might be one moral of this week\u2019s events. A few days ago, expectations were sky-high that the Federal Reserve was about to reduce its current $85bn monthly bond purchases. But then the Fed blinked, partly because it is worried that markets have already over-reacted to the mere thought of a policy shift. Faced with a choice of curbing the addiction or providing more hits of the QE drug, in other words, it chose the latter.<\/p>\n<p>In many ways this is understandable; the real economic data is still soft. But as investors try to fathom what the Fed will (not) do next, it is worth pondering a timely speech made recently by former UK regulator Lord Turner. As he told Swedish economists last week, and repeated to central bankers and economists in London this week, the real story behind the recent dramatic financial sagas \u2013 be that the market dance around QE or the crisis at Lehman Brothers five years ago \u2013 is that western economies have become hooked on ever-expanding levels of debt.<\/p><\/blockquote>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"<p>Gillian Tett: The danger with addictions is they tend to become increasingly complusive. That might be one moral of this week\u2019s events. A few days ago, expectations were sky-high that the Federal Reserve was about to reduce its current $85bn monthly bond purchases. But then the Fed blinked, partly because it is worried that markets [&hellip;]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":2,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"closed","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[1],"tags":[],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.zmetro.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/5386"}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.zmetro.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.zmetro.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.zmetro.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/users\/2"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.zmetro.com\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcomments&post=5386"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/www.zmetro.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/5386\/revisions"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.zmetro.com\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fmedia&parent=5386"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.zmetro.com\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcategories&post=5386"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.zmetro.com\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Ftags&post=5386"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}