My friend Vitaliy Katsenelson writes this short but thought-provoking analysis. "Mark Twain said, 'To a man with a hammer, everything looks like a nail.' To a Fed – an institution employing an army of economists and academics – everything looks like an economic problem that needs to be quantitatively eased. But the Fed is killing the economy.... "Sir Alan Greenspan, who, after he left the Fed, suddenly turned into a rational and comprehensible person, was on The Charlie Rose Show in June, where he said that businesses don’t want to invest because they are concerned about the future. I agree. "Ironically, it is the Fed’s intervention in the free market and arbitrarily setting short- and long-term interest rates at insanely low levels that is responsible for this uncertainty, as it enables and propagates speculation, not investing (two distinctly different activities) and erodes confidence about the future. Usually, in investing, liquid capital is turned into illiquid by committing it to a higher, more productive long-term use. Ability (read: confidence) to forecast after-tax cash flows...."