Up, Up And Away

This is what real bureaucratic screw-ups do--screw it up and then suddenly announce there's nothing more they can further screw up and pass the buck. From Fed Chair Janet Yellen to other Fed apologists like Mohammed El-Erian and his drivel in his last book, The Only Game In Town, full of self-praise and singing the accolades of Lady Yellen and the Lords of  Eccles, it's bailout time.

El-Erian misnamed his tome. It should've been titled, The Only Shame In Town.

Get your hat. Blaming Brexit as Marvelous Magic Mario and others are now pushing is just sleight of the hand gestures. Public debt is going up, up and away.
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 Central banks' repeated warnings that there are limits to what they can do to bolster the sputtering world economy could suggest they are about to pull back and pass the baton to governments. But a steady flow of research and a new tone in the debate among policymakers and advisers points in a different direction: rather than retreat, central banks are preparing for the day they may need to do more, even at the risk of antagonizing politicians who argue they already have too much power.
 

The shift can be seen in the acknowledgment by Federal Reserve policymakers that their massive $4 trillion balance sheet will not shrink anytime soon, or that asset buying may become a "recurrent" tool of future monetary policy. It can be seen in the comments of Bank of England officials who talk of crisis-fighting tools as now semi-permanent fixtures, or in the Bank of Japan developing a new monetary policy framework, in this case targeting long-term market interest rates.

Driving those developments is an emerging consensus among policymakers who now acknowledge that the global financial crisis has led to a fundamental shift toward low inflation, tepid growth, lagging productivity and interest rates stuck near zero. "We could be stuck in a new longer-run equilibrium characterized by sluggish growth and recurrent reliance on unconventional monetary policy," Fed Vice Chair Stanley Fischer said last wee. For years, Federal reserve and other policymakers have discounted such a scenario, arguing that temporary factors were slowing the recovery and plotting a return to conventional pre-crisis policies.

Over the past months, though, that optimism has given way to an admission that such a return is increasingly elusive. Interest rates are set to stay low far longer than thought only a year ago and jumbo balance sheets accumulated through crisis-era asset purchases are now cast as a possibly permanent tool.

reuters.com/article/us-imf-g20-centralbanks-analysis-

At the annual Jackson Hole Fed conference in August the discussion had shifted from the mechanics and timing of "normalization," to how and whether to expand the central bank footprint yet again

Policymakers still keep reminding governments they should help boost productivity and growth with reforms and, where possible, spending on infrastructure.