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People who believe the hype about hyperinflation from (Schiff, Zerohedge, Denninger etc) need to look at the actual data.

Amen.

Excerpt from Is the Crowd Wrong on QE2? - This round of quantitative easing might surprise its critics - B, by Alan Abelson (a notable curmudgeon), 2010 November 06

< snip > ..... We don't have space enough to offer more than some snippets from the full report [by Northern Trust's Paul Kasriel and Asha Bangalore], but hope you'll get the flavor. Paul and Asha point out that QE1 covered the 16 months ended March 2010, during which stretch the Fed's outright holdings increased by a net of only $200 billion, while other elements of Fed credit shrank by a net $1.3 trillion, including an $875 billion contraction in the commercial-banking system's credit. The net change in credit in the first round of QE came to -$675 billion, which explains why its effect was so feeble.
By contrast, they reckon that during the next seven months of QE, it's conceivable that the combined Federal Reserve and commercial-system credit could increase by more than 5%, the most since March 2009. That wouldn't be enough to spark a boom in nominal aggregate demand, they concede, but it would "help prevent the economy from slipping back into a recession in the face of substantial headwinds emanating from the housing and state/local government sectors."
Not a panacea for what ails us, but avoiding a double dip is no small thing, either. ..... < snip >

By the way, the same article exposes how BLS played with "seasonal adjustment" numbers (lowered "expected jobs" numbers) to come up with employment payrolls expanding by 151.000 while the separate Household Survey showed an employment drop of 330,000.

Excerpt from another (must-read in full) article:
Enjoy the Good Times While They Last | An interview with Scott Minerd, chief investment officer of Guggenheim Partners - B, by Lawrence C. Strauss, 2010 November 06

< snip > ..... Mark Twain said that history doesn't repeat itself, it just rhymes. And the events we are experiencing today look a lot like the same experiences that we had in the 1930s. There are lessons to be taken away from the 1930s that are useful in evaluating both policy and markets today. The lesson that we learned in the 1930s was not to run a restrictive monetary policy and not to allow protective barriers to go up against trade. Those have been the two things that I have kept my eye on throughout the ongoing financial crisis.
There is no doubt that the chairman of the Federal Reserve, Ben Bernanke, is a student of history himself and is very aware of the monetary accidents of the 1930s. And as the chairman of the Federal Reserve during this period, his worst nightmare would be for the United States to fall into a debt-deflation spiral. Therefore, he is engaging in a series of policies that are creating excess liquidity in the system, relative to the mistake that was made in the 1930s. That will probably be sufficient to keep the United States from falling back into a recession. ..... < snip >

Bernanke and the Fed didn't create the fiscal structural problems (deficit spending by Congress and Administrations) and monetary policy never can and should not be expected to fix the problems that arise from irresponsible, reckless and destructive fiscal policies. The Fed simply "can't make a silk purse of a sow's ear."

This mindless bashing of the Fed and Bernanke only serves to help Democrats and opportunistic politicians who would like to blame their mistakes on someone else or some other law to divert attention from their outlandish deficit spending and restrictive regulations and failures of their attempts at command-and-control economy (like "home ownership society" and CRA / Fannie-Freddie-FHA-HUD) - just as Barney Frank tried to do by pointing fingers at repeal of Glass-Steagall as a source of financial meltdown.

Why the conservatives / Republicans keep falling for these ploys and take their eyes off the real problems and the real targets, I don't understand. That's how they allowed Clinton to "redefine" himself and look like kooks when they were constantly negative on anything and everything, instead of taking credit for things that were done right and went right (especially due to their own efforts with Contract With America) and thus letting Clinton take credit for the good and getting blame for the bad. Hard to take credit for doing good while bashing anything that's going on and having a doom-and-gloom attitude on everything just because the President is from another party. Instead, take the credit where it belongs (due to your efforts) and "invite" the opponent to join you and "share" in your success. Then the voters will know who really "owns" it.

The "competitive devaluation" of the USD$ started shortly after George W. Bush became President despite feeble pronouncements of keeping "the policy of strong dollar". And most other developed and emerging industrial economies (with the exception of possibly, Australia and Canada - natural resource-rich-exporting countries) were engaging in the same behavior (China's yuan/renmimbi, Japan's yen, British pound, even Euro, etc.) - that's the simple explanation for rising prices of commodities (oil, precious and industrial metals, etc. etc.).

Taking into account the government's fiscal tax-regulate-borrow-and-spend-everything spree of the last "lost decade," QE2, in and of itself, doesn't do anything special in that regard and it had been leaked and "advertised" by Bernanke since late July. The Fed has been more transparent in the last decade than at any time in its history, and is being "audited" at least twice a year, every year, before both chambers of U.S. Congress.

Not only conservatives are getting it wrong on what Bernanke and the Fed are doing (sorry to see Rush in that category, again, and unfortunately he seems to be leading a "parade") but focusing so intensely on the Fed / Bernanke as the "source of all evil" but they are allowing, even inviting, politicians and political opportunists to have a convenient scapegoat for the and avoid their own responsibility for budgets, taxation and regulation policies - the real problems and growing uncompetitiveness of the U.S. economy currently and and in the future. Blaming the Fed for this is like blaming the IRS for setting income tax rates.

To increase competitiveness, it's better to look at, attack and repeal the stupid legislations and regulations of the last decade - (ObamaCare, Finreg / Dodd-Frank, Sarbox / SOX / Sarbanes-Oxley, education financing and gov't takeover of student loans etc.) If people keep taking their eyes off the ball and keep looking at the scapegoats provided to them by scheming politicians and some opportunistic "financial / economic gurus" then they will keep falling into the same trap they fell in during the Clinton era, again and again.