One thing that became abundantly clear about QE long ago even if it hasn’t yet dawned on Mario Draghi or Haruhiko Kuroda, is that the practice of monetizing anything and everything that isn’t tied down (or that you can’t pry from the cold dead hand of an institutional investor), is subject to the law of diminishing returns. 

Put simply: eventually it just stops working in terms of stimulating aggregate demand and/or boosting growth and inflation expectations.

Unfortunately, the deleterious effects of QE are not subject to the same dynamic. 

That is, when you print another say, €750 million to monetize everything from periphery EGBs to SSAs to munis, you invariably impair market liquidity on the way to creating the conditions for dangerous bouts of volatility (see the great bund VaR shock for instance). 

Of course when you go full-Kuroda and simply corner the market for ETFs by stepping in to provide plunge protection at the first sign of Nikkei weakness, there’s no telling what kind of chaos you’ve set everyone up for once you step out of the market. Meanwhile, the mad dash to inflate the value of stocks and bonds has served to create enormous bubbles not only in those assets, but also in the things people who hold those assets are likely to buy when they get bored – like real estate and high end art. 

In short, the drug addiction analogy (as cliche as it now is) still holds up remarkably well. For a drug addict, the benefits (i.e. the high) diminishes the more the addiction grows, but the harmful effects on the body do not. It’s the same thing with QE. The initial “high” wears off, but the asset bubbles only grow. 

Nowhere is this more apparent than in Japan where just last night, we witnessed the unprecedented “quintuple recession”: 

As if that wasn’t bad enough, Japanese business spending dropped 1.3% QoQ – its worst drop since Q2 2014.