As if there were any doubt.

John Carney:

With a subtle wave of his baton, the aspiring Maestro may have started the music for another round of Federal Reserve monetary easing.

Ben Bernanke, chairman of the US central bank and keeper of the keys to stock market money flows, oversaw a tweaking of wording in the Fed’s post-meeting statement that had trading floors buzzing.

The statement, which preceded the chairman’s first-ever news conference following a Fed Open Markets Committee meeting, simply stated that the group will “ regularly review the size and composition of its securities holdings in light of incoming information and is prepared to adjust those holdings as needed to best foster maximum employment and price stability.”

The change in wording was subtle, but for the market it was shorthand (or perhaps longhand, considering the chairman’s traditionally opaque language) that another round of quantitative easing—QE3 in market parlance—was on the way.

There just isn't enough damn inflation! 

Marc Faber appeared on CNBC today to talk about gold. Along the way, he launched into a devastating analysis of class, democracy, and decadence... to the great befuddlement of his hosts. 

Something strange is happening at the Fed; just look at this chart. 

The last time the Fed went nuts with monetary expansion, it did it in the wake of the Lehman collapse, on behalf, and likely at the behest, of the failing financial sector. The mood at the time was, "Consequences be damned, we've got to save Wall Street!"  No doubt, many truly believed that their world was ending.  

Now, however, the Fed has been pumping like mad for three months, even though, by all indicators, the media and financial industry seems to believe that all is hunky-dory. 

Graham Summers (via Zero Hedge):

This is a chart of the US monetary base. In simple terms, it charts how much money the Fed has pumped into the system (at least that it admits). So it’s a kind of visual of the Fed hitting the PANIC button: when the monetary base explodes higher, the Fed is FREAKING out.

You'll note that during the Financial Crisis the Fed didn't do much until the autumn of 2008 when it pumped nearly $1 trillion into the system. Think about that, the Fed didn't go nuts pumping money until the stuff REALLY hit the fan.

You'll also note that there's only one other time when the monetary base went absolutely vertical: TODAY.

Indeed, the Fed has pumped nearly $500 billion into the system since the start of 2011. Don't even try to tell me  this is QE 2. If it was then the monetary base should have spiked in late 2010, NOT in 2011.

No, this is the Fed FREAKING OUT about the financial system again. And it's a freak out on par with 2008.

George W. Bush spent hundreds of billions of dollars, over 4,000 American dead and nearly 32,000 wounded, all to make Iraq a democracy.

Then Ben Bernanke comes along and prints a few trillion, causes world food prices to spike, and all of a sudden we've got revolutions all over the Middle East, revolutions which have at least as much a chance, maybe better, at making these countries as democratic as Iraq (and Afghanistan) currently are. A dictatorship which looked to last nearly forever, Gaddafi's, is on the ropes and headed for a fall, after years of American and especially European sucking up to it, all because of Big Ben.

Maybe when Bush and the neocons got their grand idea to invade the Middle East and turn the Muslim countries into democracies, they should instead have just fired Greenspan and appointed Helicopter Ben Bernanke. Though he's clueless as to the unintended consequences of his money printing, he's inadvertently spreading democracy, and so far at no cost in American lives.

Viewing scenes of mass riots, looting, blood in the streets, the torching of government buildings, and the Egyptian army opening fire on citizens, most mainstream commentators have discussed the situation in Cairo in the only way they know how—it’s all about “democracy.”

Summed up briefly, Egyptian President Hosni Mubarak is a “brutal dictator” and is finally getting his comeuppance. The solution is for Egypt to hold elections… or rather, hold elections that the Muslim Brotherhood wouldn’t win, for “democracy” means voting in pro-Israel, pro-Washington, and pro-market representatives. At any rate, once Egyptian Twitter is turned back on, liberal utopia will ensue. 

More nuanced commentators have noted Washington’s incoherent and frivolous policy of trying to unleash democracy in the Middle East—and finaning such forces—while at the same time giving massive foreign-aid outlays (1.5 billion) to Mubarak’s Egypt in the hope of stability. (It seems that even the most devout neocon, neo-liberal, and globalist recognizes that the true voice of the demos in the Middle East is something close to Islamism.)

Very few have asked the all-important question of “Why now?”—that is, what caused, or at least sparked, this violent uprising, as well as similar affairs in Tunisia, Algeria, and Yemen? The Arab Republic of Egypt had been chugging right along under Mubarak’s dictatorship for some 30 years; indeed, Egypt experienced steady GDP growth of late, putting the lie to the idea that democracy is correlated with economic progress. So again, why now? What has changed? Did Egyptians simply wake up last Thursday morning and collectively decide that they’ve had enough and now want to vote?