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As I understand it, the purpose of QE is to cause inflation so that people start spending money instead of sitting on savings (which is what they are doing now), because inflation decreases the value of savings. Normally inflation can regulated through interest rates (the Fed does this all the time during normal economic times, and nobody seems to care), but interest rates can't currently be lowered any further, leaving QE as the only option if you want to increase inflation. Since the biggest problem in the US economy is that people aren't spending money, and the legislative branch is incapable of taking any substantive action on the economy, some economists think this is the only option to try to boost the US Economy. I think the characterization of the motivations at least is misleading, but who knows if it will actually work.
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