“The storyline is that global growth is decelerating,” Mike Ryan, chief investment strategist at UBS Wealth Management Americas, told Bloomberg. “Financial stresses are rising and policymakers are finding few viable options to stabilize the real economy.”
That leaves [Ben] Bernanke and company in a bind.
“The Fed can only do so much,” Greg McBride of the financial website Bankrate.com, told NPR’s Scott Horsley. “Their most effective tools are things that they have used up already. At this point, they’ve got a few options left, but none of them is a surefire way to either jump-start the economy or get people to borrow or get banks to lend. There’s still a demand problem. And that is not something that the Fed alone can fix.”