Picture this. You are bidding on a house, or a piece of art, or maybe a rare Honus Wagner baseball card and there’s a guy in the back of the room who keeps raising his hand to drive the price higher.

And you already know this much about the guy — he’s in cahoots with the auctioneer. Plus — and this is what really irks you — you also know this other bidder has a printing press in his basement that he’s been using to churn out currency.

So this shill really doesn’t care what he pays.

I’ve just described US government bond auctions under what is called Quantitative Easing, or QE, which is ending soon after nearly six years.

You have to know this much about the bond market before you keep reading: driving the price of bonds higher automatically reduces interest rates. It’s a teeter-totter: Rates go down when bond prices rise, and vice versa. No exceptions.

So the QE scam was foolproof, as long as other bond buyers were willing to play along.

The auctioneer in the case of QE is the US Treasury, which sells trillions of dollars of bonds each year to paper over the US government deficit. The shill is the Federal Reserve, which has been printing trillions in extra money to buy these government bonds.

And the patsy is anyone who has been competing with the Fed for those bonds since QE began in November 2008.

QE has been successful in some ways. It has kept interest rates artificially low, allowed people to refinance homes at great rates and helped financial institutions earn an outsized profits without taking much risk.

It has also allowed Washington to pay less for the money it borrows. US government debt, already more than $17.7 trillion, would be substantially higher if the Treasury had been forced to pay normal interest rates to lenders over the past six years.

QE has been an invisible tax on savers beyond anything Washington could have ever conceived.

Supporters will even argue that QE saved the world financial system. QE came into being at a time when Washington was convinced — and was convincing the nation — that the financial system was on the verge of collapse.

And it was a time when interest rates were already very low, so the Fed’s normal monetary solutions were useless. And US debt was already outsized, so the idea of spending our way out of trouble was unrealistic.

But ideas like QE are similar to new drugs. A drug maker doesn’t really have to prove efficacy. All it has to do is claim you would be worse off without the drug.

How can you prove them wrong?

This much we do know, however. The US economy hasn’t been growing by much since QE made its first appearance. And despite a recent upswing, job growth has been lackluster.

While banks are been raking it in, they haven’t made loans more easily accessible to people and companies.

And, really, who can blame them! All that talk about financial disaster that helped the Fed sell the idea of QE should have made banks more conservative when it came to loans.

There’s one more thing that QE accomplished: it has made the stock market soar. Interest rates have remained so low for so long that investors have had no other choice but to move their money into the stock market, thus creating a bubble.

Even those adverse to risk were forced to chase the better yields in stocks, no matter how dangerous that was.

But for every winner in QE there are 99 losers. While the richest 1% of the US population has been loving the rise in stock prices and other QE amenities, Fed policy has been taxing on the masses of savers.

In fact, “tax” is a perfect word. QE has been an invisible tax on savers beyond anything Washington could have ever conceived.

Every dollar that has benefited a borrower during QE has come out of the pocket of a saver in the form of a lower return on their assets.

In fact, QE is now widely recognized by both supporters and opponents as causing the single largest shift ever in wealth, from middle class savers to rich Wall Street investors.

And that this should have happened under a Democratic president who came into office championing wealth redistribution in the other direction is both shocking and ironic.

There’s more. Just because the Fed is ending its bond buying doesn’t mean the last chapter has been written for QE.

But ideas like QE are similar to new drugs. A drug maker doesn’t really have to prove efficacy. All it has to do is claim you would be worse off without the drug.

The Fed’s balance sheet rose from $850 billion before the crisis to over $4 trillion. It now owns 25% of all outstanding US government securities and 30% of all mortgage-backed securities.

The Fed can’t just sell them or all that extra money will cause inflation. And they can’t just be thrown in a pile and burned — at least, I don’t think they can. The fact that QE was unprecedented makes the ending to this story an unknown.

And if the Fed — as has been proposed — is allowed to keep those bonds until maturity there is no telling what the effect will be on future economic activity.

Will bond buyers in the year 2020 become reluctant to lend the US government money knowing that this pile of QE bonds owned by the Fed is still looming over the market?

And what about the ordinary bond buyers — the patsies — who have been paying too much and getting too little turn over the last six years? Remember, as interest rates rise to more normal levels over the next few years, their bonds will lose value.

Will the patsies still be happy customers of US bonds? If they aren’t, the US economy will be stymied by higher interest rates forever. And there might not be another set of chumps to bail us out.