The Bernanke Fed

Courtesy of Jesse’s Café Américain

As the maestro, Greenspan, was ultimately shown to be greatly mistaken, perhaps even a fraud, so eventually Ben Bernanke also will be shown to be cut from the same cloth, with less verbal acuity. His approach to the US banking system is naive, as one might expect from an eager student with little or no practical experience.

"Mr. Bernanke, an academic who has never worked a single day in his life. He will take anything off a cliff: a business, a McDonald’s stand, the Federal Reserve. And I have to say I have a certain sympathy for him as a character. He’s ok, but completely useless. I would not even hire him as my butler…Mr Bernanke is a madman, a destroyer of the value of money. And he is a wealth destroyer and an economic criminal. It is the duty of a central bank to keep the value of money. I believe today for ninety percent of Americans life is harder than it was in 1999. Basically I think they are a bunch of crooks."
Marc Faber on King World News

"There is no room for ambiguity in this story. Bernanke was at the Fed since the fall of 2002. (He had a brief stint in 2005 as chair of President Bush’s Council of Economic Advisors.) At a point when at least some economists recognized the housing bubble and began to warn of the damage that would result from its collapse, Bernanke insisted that everything was fine and that nothing should be done to rein in the bubble."
Bernanke and the Corruption of Washington Culture – Dean Baker