Customer-side CEOs in particular are growing increasingly fed up with the apparent black arts of IT operations that require larger and larger budgets without predictably delivering more and more business value.
These three sets of policy tools--lending to financial institutions, providing liquidity directly to key credit markets, and buying longer-term securities--have the common feature that each represents a use of the asset side of the Fed's balance sheet, that is, they all involve lending or the purchase of securities.
On the consumer spending side, the Fed acknowledged a slowdown in retail sales, which can has been corroborated by the likes of Wal-Mart, Target, and Best Buy, as I previously reported.