"'The Fed is the greatest hedge fund in history, ... it's generating $80 billion or $90 billion a year probably' in revenue"<p>Can you get more asinine than that? Probably? How is this relevant when the Fed is printing $85 BILLION a month to finance ongoing bond purchases? Guys like Buffet must absolutely love the Fed because they have an outlet to offload their illiquid garbage bonds and derivatives.<p>Imagine if you made a terrible investment that loses most of its value... you're screwed, you have no choice but to suffer, eat the losses, and move on. But wait! The government opens a shop where they'll buy your investment for close to you original principal. You're saved! Amazing. I'd write nonsense articles praising the government too.
Buffet is just a shill for the USG in the confidence game of US treasuries. Sure the fed is under no pressure to sell, the pressure is really on the fed to not stop buying.<p>QE infinity is all about hiding the fact foreigners are exiting treasuries so the fed is the last resort buyer of USG debt. Without the fed backstopping, interest rates paid by the USG on its debt would have to go up which would very quickly crash the system.<p>Warren is just doing his patriotic duty to kick the can a little further down the road.
I don't understand this point of view, sorry Warren. The fed is generating revenue for the government in a certain sense, yes, but saying it is a successful hedge fund is like me saying that if I hold a bunch of bonds in my portfolio throwing off some interest that is a successful hedge fund. The entire question is what are they going to be able to sell those bonds back to the market for. If they end up having to sell them at a massive loss, which is likely, then all that revenue they've been throwing off in interest better offset those losses. I might have this wrong but it seems to be very odd to characterize the fed's QE programs as a success when it is literally an experiment in progress.
If any person, non-profit, or regular corporation, ran their business the way the Federal Reserve did, they would be in jail as soon as what they were doing was public knowledge.<p>The only reason we have this ridiculous system in place is because military force.
The Fed is not driven by a profit motive, but rather acts in the best interests of the people of the United States. This makes it as opposite of a hedge fund as you can get.<p>Buffett is tongue-lashing the Fed in public because Buffet's investments won't do well if inflation hits, and he wants the Fed to reabsorb all of the money it has printed before inflation appears.
Nice clear thinking from Buffet. The ideas are very old, only the implementation is new.<p>First, the Fed's actions are a mix of fiscal and monetary stimulus. They are not different to Keynes' idea of fiscal stimulus, since they inject money into the economy in cases where even zero interest rates couldn't.<p>Second, in order for stimulus to work, it must convince people to make long term decisions (such as building physical factories, starting companies, buying durable goods, etc.) and therefore the Fed must commit to a long term stimulus plan. Buffet clearly outlines the Fed's approach to making this commitment.<p>I know a lot of people on HN are deeply suspicious of mainstream macroeconomics, and that is understandable since even with my training I can't really verify that people in the field are doing things right. However, I will say that there are a large number of countries in the world that are big enough to have their independent macroeconomic policy. So far, no country I'm aware of has chosen not to use the above two principles, which together can be taken as a summary of neo-Keynsian economics. If there really some better way out there I think that some country would have tried it.