The best review on the job facing Fed nominee Yellen as Chairman of the Federal Reserve comes from our neighbors to the north, go to the Canadian Business Press for the full story…

Barring any last-minute hitch, Janet Yellen will soon take the wheel at the U.S. Federal Reserve. While that raises questions about how monetary policy may change, for banks and their investors there is another issue: Who will be riding shotgun with her on regulatory policy?

Facing a squad of U.S. senators firing question upon question, Janet Yellen might have been surprised that no one asked her the obvious one: Can the Federal Reserve taper its $85-billion-a-month asset purchase program without compromising the housing recovery?

Yellen breezed through questions about the financial crisis, the Fed’s stimulus efforts and banking regulation, as the Senate Banking Committee weighed her nomination to serve as future head of the Federal Reserve.

While a few senators raised concerns about the more than $3 trillion in stimulus the Fed has been injecting into the U.S. economy, Yellen defended the central bank with ease, often pointing to high unemployment as her top concern above all else.

“This is a virtually unprecedented situation,” she said, referring to the 4 million Americans who have remained unemployed for more than six months. “We know that those long spells of unemployment are particularly painful for households, impose great hardship and costs on those without work, on the marriages of those who suffer these long unemployment spells,” she added. “So I consider it imperative that we do what we can to promote a very strong recovery.”

In her first congressional hearing as nominee to become the world’s most powerful central banker, Yellen didn’t seem in a hurry to scale back the Fed’s massive bond buys, known as quantitative easing (QE). There is no evidence that the policy, which encourages borrowing by keeping long-term interest rates low, has inflated dangerous bubbles in the stock market and residential real estate, she said. She did acknowledge, however, that QE “cannot go on forever.” And when the time comes for the exit, the masterful trick she will have to perform is letting rates appreciate while preserving the housing momentum.

It’s a tall order, even for a central banker as experienced as Yellen, who has been the Fed’s vice-chair until now. The housing market revival, propelled by cheap mortgages, has been a tailwind for the entire economy. The Fed’s mere mention of trimming QE, though, sent mortgage rates up by a full percentage point this summer. Home sales fell, and real estate prices cooled.

Still, there are at least two reasons to think that Yellen can have her cake and eat it too—that is, oversee higher long-term rates and a healthy housing market. For one, homes in most of the U.S. “are still the deal of the decade,” says TD economist Beata Caranci. Let’s say that, over the next two years, the QE taper pushes rates on the most popular 30-year mortgages up to 5.5%, from 4.5% today, and home price growth slows to 5% year-over-year from the current 12%. Financing a home purchase in most of the U.S. would still be cheaper or in line with what it was through the pre-bubble 1990–2003 period, says Caranci.

Rising interest rates could also paradoxically make it easier for some first-time homebuyers to qualify for a mortgage. Rattled by the financial crisis, lenders have avoided new mortgage applicants to focus on homeowners refinancing existing mortgages. After last summer’s mortgage rate hike, though, refinancing activity dropped 60%. That may explain why some banks have loosened lending standards, as the Fed’s latest bank lending survey shows. Yellen’s task, it seems, is unenviable but not impossible.

Andrew Huszar, a former Morgan Stanley managing director, managed the Federal Reserve’s $1.25 trillion agency mortgage-backed security purchase program from 2009 to 2010, wrote this recent op-ed in The Wall Street Journal. As the Dow stayed above 16,000 today, we thought it worth reprinting once again. You don’t hear this kind of mea-culpa from a Federal Reserve official everyday.

“I’m sorry, America,” writes Andrew Huszar, the quarterback of the largest bond-buying spree in American history, who claims U.S. taxpayers are on the hook for more than $4 trillion in government bond-buying debt. “I was responsible for executing the centerpiece program of the Fed’s first plunge into the bond-buying experiment known as quantitative easing (QE). The central bank continues to spin QE as a tool for helping Main Street. But I’ve come to recognize the program for what it really is: the greatest backdoor Wall Street bailout of all time.”

Writing in The Wall Street Journal last week, Huszar continues his mea culpa: “Despite the Fed’s rhetoric, my program wasn’t helping to make credit any more accessible for the average American. The banks were only issuing fewer and fewer loans. More insidiously, whatever credit they were extending wasn’t getting much cheaper. QE may have been driving down the wholesale cost for banks to make loans, but Wall Street was pocketing most of the extra cash.”

Huszar claims that quantitative easing, or QE, isn’t working. He worries it could end badly for U.S. taxpayers. But QE is great for Wall Street, he claims.

“Trading for the first round of QE ended on March 31, 2010,” writes Huszar. “The final results confirmed that, while there had been only trivial relief for Main Street, the U.S. central bank’s bond purchases had been an absolute coup for Wall Street. The banks hadn’t just benefited from the lower cost of making loans. They’d also enjoyed huge capital gains on the rising values of their securities holdings and fat commissions from brokering most of the Fed’s QE transactions. Wall Street had experienced its most profitable year ever in 2009, and 2010 was starting off in much the same way.”

By 2010, Huszar started to question the wisdom of QE-1, but the bond-buying party was just getting started. QE infinity seemed to be the new policy.

“You’d think the Fed would have finally stopped to question the wisdom of QE,” he argues. “Think again. Only a few months later — after a 14 percent drop in the U.S. stock market and renewed weakening in the banking sector — the Fed announced a new round of bond buying: QE2.”

Where are we today? The Fed keeps buying roughly $85 billion in bonds a month, chronically delaying so much as a minor QE taper. Over five years, its bond purchases have come to more than $4 trillion. Amazingly, in a supposedly free-market nation, QE has become the largest financial-markets intervention by any government in world history.

Huszar ends his public confession with a warning and some advice.

“As for the rest of America, good luck,” writes Huszar, a senior fellow at Rutgers Business School. “Because QE was relentlessly pumping money into the financial markets during the past five years, it killed the urgency for Washington to confront a real crisis: that of a structurally unsound U.S. economy. Yes, those financial markets have rallied spectacularly, breathing much-needed life back into 401(k)s, but for how long? Experts like Larry Fink at the BlackRock investment firm are suggesting that conditions are again “bubble-like.” Meanwhile, the country remains overly dependent on Wall Street to drive economic growth.

The Dow Jones industrial average closed above 16,000 for the first time Thursday as the blue-chip index races toward its best year in a decade. The Dow has been propelled by the easy-money policies from the Federal Reserve. Since the start of the year, the Dow is up 22 per cent and has now topped three 1,000 point milestones in 10 months. It eclipsed 14,000 in February and 15,000 in May. If it holds onto its gains, it would notch its strongest performance since 2003.

Even when acknowledging QE’s shortcomings, Chairman Bernanke argues that some action by the Fed is better than none (a position that his likely successor, Fed Vice Chairwoman Janet Yellen, also embraces). The implication is that the Fed is dutifully compensating for the rest of Washington’s dysfunction. But the Fed is at the center of that dysfunction. Case in point: It has allowed QE to become Wall Street’s new “too big to fail” policy.”

For full story go to The Wall Street Journal.

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