Both Jim Hamilton and Calculated Risk parsed Dennis Lockhart´s Friday speech and both summarized the speech thus:

My support for the current stance of policy rests on a forecast that sees a step-up of output and employment growth by year-end and into 2013. If the economy continues on the track indicated by the most recent incoming data and information, that forecast will become untenable, as will the policy premises underlying it.

Lockhart plays the role of the FOMC´s ‘representative agent’. Neither on the ‘right’ nor on the ‘left’, but sitting right there in the ‘middle’ pondering…

The problem is that when a prescription such as ‘QE’ is written up, it becomes the ‘talk of the town’ and the ‘miracle cure’ for all ailments. But, like all medicine it´s not a panacea and has to be administered in the correct dosage with the goal to be obtained from taking the ‘pill’ being stated up front so as to allow both the correct expectations on the part of the patient and an adequate evaluation process on the part of the doctor.

Those things did not happen in versions 1 & 2 and are unlikely to happen in version 3. And since there´s ‘public knowledge’ of the temporary nature of the ‘boost’, a lot less ‘suckers’ will fall for it, meaning its effects will likely be a lot weaker than in the previous version, which was already more tame than in the first. So QE is quickly becoming a ‘placebo’.