There was more than enough evidence that QE didn’t work fifteen years ago. The Japanese had accumulated these monetary experiments at the dawn of the 21st century. And there was even a time when US and Western central bankers were skeptical. What happened was 2008; a dislocation so big and widespread they had no choice but to embrace the failure for lack of any other options.

Once they did, what was most charitably ambiguous suddenly became genius. When the Japanese did these things, they were suspect; when Western central bankers did, they were awesome. Same planet, different worlds.

Only, the Japanese central bankers kept doing them, too. It’s much harder to hide in Japan than it has been in the United States or Europe. The decimated economic landscape there leaves little open to interpretation. This is not a positive comparison since Japan is merely our forerunner, a look into our future.

To begin with, the central bank is (largely) irrelevant. QE or QQE is nothing more than a series of tricks, smoke and mirrors glossed up to sound impressive and a little scientific (portfolio effects!) In reality, the world which we share with the impoverished (literally) Japanese, unfortunately, magic tricks can’t replace true economic processes. That’s why QE never worked to begin the millennium and it doesn’t now no matter how many additional letters and numbers are added to it.

The Bank of Japan, like Economists in the West, can’t admit it. They just can’t. To do so would mean to confess decades of incompetence and gross dereliction. It is a binary choice; we keep getting these non-answers until someone forces them to stop. They won’t do it voluntarily.

I wrote in April 2016, more than two wasted years ago:

Central banks have proven by their own actions, not their words, that they will only allow “their” recovery which in the end means none. As I have written before, if they were given a choice of maintaining power and control but only leading to more lost decades, or stepping aside and being guaranteed a full and sustainable recovery, they would choose the former every single time. True global economic recovery is purely a political action now; central banks will not restrain themselves no matter how much their schemes backfire and create only more disruption and havoc.