WASHINGTON, DC-In mid-September the Federal Reserve Bank, to absolutely no one’s surprise, announced it would expand its holdings of long-term securities by making open-ended purchases of mortgage-backed securities a month—to the tune of $40 billion. It was the third round of quantitative easing by the Central Bank.

One month later, GlobeSt.com readers are clearly less than impressed with the endeavor. In our weekly poll we asked readers if they thought QE3 would help the economy and gave them three possible answers to select. The majority (65%) selected no it would not, agreeing that it was “more bluster and posturing.” Nineteen percent said yes, it would help, and 16% selected “at this point, solutions are beyond me.”

Peter Cohan, of Peter S. Cohan & Assoc. tells GlobeSt.com he is not surprised at the response. “Well, it’s not helping, it’s as simple as that. It is not having the desired effect of getting people to borrow money. It’s like pushing on a wet noodle.” The only good news, he says, is that the Fed’s aggressive monetary policy has not caused inflation to rise.

Indeed, this very point was the focus of a Reuters blog, which pointed to arguments made by economists at TD Securities that banks have passed on less than half of their lower funding rates. The blog also highlighted a speech given this week by New York Fed President William Dudley. “Federal Reserve MBS purchases have succeeded in driving down mortgage rates to historically low levels,” Dudley said. “But these purchases would have had still more effect on the economy if pass-through rates from the secondary market to the primary market had been higher.”

One constituency that is happy with QE3, not surprisingly, are the GSEs, from which the Fed is making its $40-billion purchases. The securities are single-family but the multifamily space is also benefiting, Kimberly Johnson, Fannie Mae VP of Multifamily Capital Markets, told GlobeSt.com in an earlier interview.

Perhaps a final reason why readers are so quick to write off QE3 is, for want of a better expression, quantitative easing fatigue. The Fed has been deploying since strategy since late 2008, when it announced it would purchase a total of $600 billion in agency MBS and agency debt. Then, in March 2009, it expanded this purchase program with news that it would purchase up to $1.25 trillion of agency MBS, up to $200 billion of agency debt, and up to $300 billion of longer-term Treasury debt. This round was over by early 2010.

In November 2010, the Federal Reserve went back to the well with a plan to purchase an additional $600 billion of longer-term Treasury securities over a period ending in mid-2011. About a year ago, the Fed introduced a variation on its earlier purchase programs called the maturity extension program. Using it, the Federal Reserve said it would purchase $400 billion of long-term Treasury securities and sell an equivalent amount of shorter-term Treasury securities.