The verdict on the U.S. Federal Reserve's quantitative easing program, including part 2, or QE2, will not be rendered for years. It may be longer, given the many areas of financial and economic policy the program has touched.

Anyone who says they definitively and incontrovertibly know QE2's long-term impact is not being genuine: many more data points have to occur to judge, for example, how QE2 affected banker lending psychology, let alone its impact on the U.S. economy.

That said, we can glean clues and insights by looking at current conditions, and one short-term data point reveals that since Fed Chairman Ben Bernanke disclosed the implementation of QE2 on August 27, the S&P 500 is up 17%, Bloomberg News reported Friday.

In my new book, The Age of Deleveraging: Investment Strategies for an Era of Slow Growth and Deflation, I discuss nine reasons for slow U.S. economic growth and real GDP gains of about 2% annually in the long run.

1. U.S. consumers will shift from a 25-year borrowing-and-spending binge to a saving spree. This will spread abroad as American consumers curtail the imports of the goods and services many foreign nations depend on for economic growth.

The world of international finance is a complex web. The U.S. is still the powerhouse when it comes to gross domestic product. Yet, while perched on top of the heap, the U.S. faces major problems with high-level debt and unemployment.

The U.S. Federal Reserve is faced with having to issue massive amounts of debt just to keep pace with the growing deficits. Now the Fed is planning another round of stimulus by buying more treasuries, dubbed QE2.

The U.S. economic recovery is now proceeding at an anemic pace, a 1.6% GDP growth rate in the second quarter. And to top it off, certain analysts are arguing "the Fed is out of ammunition" and that means a double-dip recession is ahead.

Well, you can consider "betting" against the Fed, and assume even worse economic conditions are ahead, but before you do, contemplate the following:

• The Fed has already signaled that it's not likely to decrease the size of its balance until it sees sustained evidence of substantial GDP growth, and an increase inf capacity utilization. The calculation here is that the Fed is going to increase its balance sheet, including the purchase of long-term U.S. Treasuries, putting even more downward pressure on long-term interest rates.

On top of the dot-com, NASDAQ, housing, oil, and commodity bubbles, add another, potential ephemeral rise: a bond bubble.

Could a bond bubble, or at least a U.S. bond bubble, occur? Indeed it could, and here's how it might appear.

Institutional investors, flush with cash, are unable to profitably deploy capital in stock-based (or comparable equity-based) investments, due to unattractive projected returns, stemming from the slow, uneven U.S. and global recoveries.

OPEC's most recent report on global oil supplies said that the world has "no room" for more crude supplies.

OPEC lowered estimates for world demand and raised predictions for non-OPEC production. Here are the numbers:

• While world demand is forecast to rise by 940,000 barrels per day (bpd) in 2010, this is 10,000 bpd lower than previously estimated.
• Non-OPEC production is set to rise by 640,000 bpd, up from 530,000.

The inflation hawks, hard-pressed to find inflation in either the consumer price index or the producer price index, or their core rates, have not given up their mission to find inflation when it doesn't exist, and isn't likely to for a long time.

CPI is running at a 2.2% annual rate, and the core rate is 0.9%. PPI is running at a high annual rate, 5.5%, but exclude food and energy, and the core rate is up just 1.0%.

The typical, alternate argument forwarded? When cash-flush banks start lending in a big way again, we'll have many more dollars chasing essentially the same amount of goods, and inflation will zoom to much higher levels.

The most compelling statistic, so far in 2010, from an investment standpoint? Arguably, it's inflation, or the lack thereof.

More than 12 months in to the biggest fiscal stimulus in the history of the modern world, and more than 15 months into the Fed's quantitative easing program, inflation, as measured by the Consumer Price Index, is running at ... about 2.3% since April 2009, according to data compiled by the U.S. Labor Department. Further, take away the volatile food and energy component, and inflation at the retail level is running at a minuscule 1.1% since April 2009.