No, Not THAT QE II!!

First, the Trial Balloons

What is all this fuss I hear about the Supreme Court decision on a "deaf" penalty? It's terrible! Deaf people have enough problems as it is!

--Befuddled spinster Emily Litella, one of Gilda Radner's several characters on the original Saturday Night Live.

Emily Litella comes to mind as the murmuring about QE II is getting louder.

No, not that QE II (pictured above).

Rather, they're talking about another round of quantitative easing by The Federal Reserve.

Because the Fed has already lowered interest rates to zero, its remaining weapon to stimulate an apparently flagging economy is to simply print more money (the fancy name for this is "quantitative easing").

In practice, that's accomplished by buying up new U. S. debt -- debt which the government has been more than happy to issue lately.

First broached on the blogosphere perhaps a month ago, the drumbeat in the MSM (main stream media) is growing discernibly louder the last 10 days or so.

P.S.: Growing up in the Twin Cities, I was confused by why everyone was making such a commotion over the West Bank. By age 8 or so, I finally figured out they were referring to the one in the Middle East.

I thought they were referring to the one across the Mississippi from the East Bank of the University of Minnesota.