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June 22, 2011, 12:00 a.m. EDT
By Brett Arends, MarketWatch
BOSTON (MarketWatch) "” The Federal Reserve's $600 billion program of "quantitative easing" has been great for Wall Street.
The flood of cheap money has helped the big banks rake in profits hand over fist. (Last quarter, Goldman Sachs Group Inc. /quotes/zigman/188479/quotes/nls/gs GS +0.61% made trading profits every single day.) Commodity speculators have grown rich. And the stock market has boomed, at least when measured in paper dollars. Since Ben Bernanke unveiled QE2 last August, the S&P 500 Index /quotes/zigman/3870025 SPX +1.34% has jumped about 24%.
With the U.S. economy showing signs of softness as the Fed's second round of "quantitative easing" is set to expire, many are asking whether a third round of stimulus is in order.
But how much benefit has been seen by Main Street investors?
To get one idea, I contacted the Investment Company Institute, the trade organization of the mutual-fund industry. They monitor comprehensive data on how much money ordinary investors are putting into mutual funds.
The finding? Ordinary investors haven't been buying into the (alleged) boom on Wall Street over the past 10 months. They've been cashing out.
In total, they've withdrawn a total of $52 billion from U.S. equity mutual funds over that period. They really missed out on the biggest gains. The heftiest withdrawals "” around half the total "” were in the first weeks, before the run-up really got going.
As if this weren't enough, when investors did buy back into the boom they didn't always pick the best moments. For example, they piled into stocks in both February and April "” just as share prices topped out. They've lost money on those trades: The stock market is lower today than it was in those months.
More than 80 million aging baby boomers are trying to reduce their exposure to equities before they retire. Maybe the best that can be said for QE2 is that, to the extent it has boosted stock prices, it has helped some of them cash out at slightly higher prices than they would have received otherwise.
But the latest analysis weakens still further the claims that QE2 has helped the economy substantially.
Even before Tuesday's grim news on home sales, we already knew that the housing market was actually worse now than it was before QE2 was launched. We already knew inflation and unemployment were higher today than they were then. We already knew economic growth is slower.
The kicker? Even the so-called boom on the stock market has been as much illusion as anything else, caused by the devaluation of the paper dollar. If you measure the stock market in a hard currency, there hasn't been much boom at all. Indeed, the turmoil of the last few weeks means the S&P 500 is now less than 2% higher, when measured in Swiss francs, than as it was on Aug. 27, when Bernanke first unveiled his big idea.
QE3, anyone?
Brett Arends is a senior columnist for MarketWatch and a personal-finance columnist for the Wall Street Journal.
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Brett Arends is an award-winning financial columnist with many years experience writing about markets, economics and personal finance in Europe and the U.S. He has received an individual award from the Society of American Business Editors and Writers for his financial writing, and was part of the Boston Herald team that won two others. He was educated at Cambridge and Oxford Universities, and has worked as an analyst at McKinsey & Co. He is a Chartered Financial Consultant (ChFC) and Accredited Asset Management Specialist (AAMS). His latest book, "Storm Proof Your Money," has just been published by John Wiley & Co.
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