“Quantitative easing is unloved and unappreciated,” you claim, “but it is working” (“Down the Slipway,” November 6, 2010). If there were an award for exaggerations, you would certainly be among the top contestants with this one. Ben Bernanke’s announcement of a new round of QE came less than a week ago. In particular, the Federal Reserve System will be buying Treasury bonds between now and next June at a rate of less than eighty-billion dollars a month. However, you fail to mention many rumors about the Fed’s move well before the announcement. For months, Bernanke used every opportunity to hint at the Fed’s next move. This amounted to veritable quantitative teasing, to coin a term. Which explains why it was “hardly breathtaking” when it eventually took place. Now, stockmarkets jumped just as The Economist went to press, and thus you quoted an anonymous hedge-fund economist as saying that “you can declare QE to be a success already.” A brave economist, this. “Whether this translates into real activity remains a question,” he or she continued, “but the question of whether the mechanism would work has been answered.” The stockmarkets have been all over the place ever since, though. Although they still show the announcement’s lift, much of the enthusiasm has evaporated. Returning to your source, the remaining question is whether this translates into “real activity.” That is the question, indeed. Answers are better left to anonymous economists, though.