Alex Tabarrok
points out that the Fed’s new promise to keep short-term
interest rates at zero for two years will, through arbitrage, lower
longer-term bond rates as well. QE2 is, basically, nothing more
than lowering interest rates on longer-term Treasury bonds, so the
Fed’s communication is more or less another way of performing
quantitative easing.
In fact, as Tabarrok mentions, the forecasting firm
Macroeconomic Advisers
has estimated that the Fed’s communication was equivalent to
about $760 billion of quantitative easing along the lines of what
the Fed did with QE2. For reference, QE2 was roughly $600 billion
in bond purchases.