Tags: Lekas | QE3 | complete | waste

Leader Capital's Lekas: QE3 'a Complete Waste of Time'

By    |   Thursday, 30 October 2014 08:21 PM EDT

There are those who supported the Federal Reserve's third round of quantitative easing, which will end next month, and there are those who opposed it.

And then there's John Lekas, CEO of Leader Capital, a bond fund manager which has $1.2 billion of assets under advisory.

"I frankly think QE3 was a complete waste of time," he told CNBC.

"Every time they've talked about ending QE, interest rates went down, the 30-year [Treasury bond] rallied, and that should shock people. Because in theory, ending that bond-buying program, rates should have gone up, and bond prices should have sold off."

To be sure, the Fed's aim was more to push rates down with its QE rather than to push them up when it stopped QE. Rates didn't rise because the economy didn't strengthen. Some—including perhaps Lekas—would blame that on the Fed, and some wouldn't.

Banks merely took the money they gained from selling bonds to the Fed and put it back in the central bank as deposits, Lekas said.

On the other side of the spectrum of views about QE, Washington Post blogger Matt O'Brien thinks the Fed should continue the program.

"The fact that it's ending QE3 despite still-low inflation and still-high, though declining, unemployment, signals that the Fed is eager to return to normalcy," he writes.

"That's not good, because, as Chicago Fed President Charles Evans explains, the 'biggest risk' to the economy right now is that the Fed raises rates too soon."

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Finance
There are those who supported the FederalReserve's third round of quantitative easing, which will end next month,and there are those who opposed it. And then there's John Lekas, CEO of Leader Capital.
Lekas, QE3, complete, waste
264
2014-21-30
Thursday, 30 October 2014 08:21 PM
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