From a future article in The New York Times:
Janet Yellen, retiring chair of the Federal Reserve Board, announced that The Fed’s quantitative easing program, aka QE12, is close to meeting its goal of achieving a 6.5% unemployment rate. 
With The Fed’s bond portfolio exceeding $10 trillion, The Fed is running out of government bonds to buy, but Chairwoman Yellen said she’s confident the U.S. Treasury will pick up the pace at which it issues new bonds.
Chairwoman Yellen praised the quantitative easing program, which she said has managed to bring the unemployment rate down to 6.8% from a peak of nearly 10% in just 12 years. QE has also helped the economy grow at a rate of nearly 2% a year.
During a brief press conference, for the first time since the quantitative easing program began, she was asked, “How does buying bonds create jobs?”
She explained that QE obviously decreased unemployment, since the unemployment rate exceeded 9% when QE began and is now approaching 6.5%.
And On … And On
We’re five years into quantitative easing and, as we discovered this week, the beat goes on … and on … and on … and on.
So QE will continue and, as we’ve said before, the federal government will keep spending beyond its means, the dollar will stay weak, interest rates will remain low (we think) and unemployment will remain high.
While a majority of economists were predicting that The Fed’s bond buying would begin to slow down in September, it hasn’t happened. We shouldn’t be surprised.
The goal of quantitative easing was to decrease the unemployment rate to 6.5%. That hasn’t happened. QE was also supposed to boost the rate of inflation to 2%. That hasn’t happened, either.
Fed Chairman Ben Bernanke
You’d think, though, that after five years of bond buying, someone somewhere would ask the question, “Is quantitative easing working?” It’s a question worth asking, because the answer is clearly, “No.”
The unemployment rate hovered near 10% in 2009 and 2010, and has since dropped to 7.6%. However, much of the drop was caused by people either leaving the workforce or taking part-time jobs. Using the U-3 rate, a person working an hour a week is counted as being fully employed.
The U-3 unemployment rate may be 7.6%, but the U-6 rate, which includes part-time workers and those who have stopped looking for employment, is 13.7%.
It’s also worth keeping in mind that those unemployment statistics come from the U.S. Bureau of Labor Statistics, a government agency. Gallup, which may be less partisan, found in a survey that the current unemployment rate was 8.7% in August.
Whatever rate you accept, the economy is still stumbling along and quantitative easing isn’t helping.
So why does QE continue? It has become a cliché to compare QE to a drug (see “Dow Jones High on Fed Steroids”), yet the comparison is apt. Like a drug, QE creates a feeling of euphoria and a false sense of reality. And, like a drug, once it becomes a habit, it’s almost impossible to stop it.