The day after the midterm elections, the Federal Reserve announced that it would begin a second round of quantitative easing: "the Committee intends to purchase a further $600 billion of longer-term Treasury securities by the end of the second quarter of 2011, a pace of about $75 billion per month." Quantitative easing is a term that was recently created to replace the more familiar term printing money. Because the historical record of printing money is so grim, that term developed a negative connotation. Of course, printing money was coined specifically to replace the older jargon debasing the currency for largely the same reason. All three mean the same thing: the government is going to create money to pay its obligations and, in so doing, your money is going to become less valuable.