Why would anyone be the slightest bit bullish in this yucky environment?

With a nod to a famous luxury liner named after Queen Elizabeth, it's a little something you might call QE 2. The letters stand for "quantitative easing," the strategy now being deployed by the Federal Reserve to attack the credit crisis after everything other tactic has failed. The number stands for the fact that this is really only the second time in history it's been tried in a meaningful way; the first was in Japan in 2001.

You may recall from Econ 101 class that central banks pursue their mission to stabilize a nation's money supply and promote economic growth in two ways: Changing the price of money via interest-rate cuts, or changing the quantity of money by printing it. Usually they pull the interest-rate lever, but in rare cases when rates approach zero, central banks turn to quantitative channels to deliver economic stimulus.

To deliver monetary stimulus at the "zero bound," as the economists say, central bankers have theorized in their ivory towers about using an array of weapons — everything from printing money to buying toxic assets and issuing new kinds of guaranteed debt.

Well this time, the Fed fancies itself staffed by superheroes who will use both of those tactics and more. It has already cooked up almost a dozen ways to create money from thin air to make $7 trillion in commitments.

The big idea is that low interest rates don't do much good if banks won't lend money out to companies, and it really doesn't do any good if companies don't have the appetite to borrow because they're afraid they can't get good returns on their investments. What happens is that money…