[JLS]

This economist thinks Bernanke may well have. Bernanke certainly followed the advice of Milton Friedman concerning what the FED should have been doing 1930-33.

[goseminoles]

Im not an economist, but am an MBA student. I pretty much agree with this article. You don’t lend money to broke people and expect it to end well..

[Zakeet]

This economist thinks Bernanke may well have. Bernanke certainly followed the advice of Milton Friedman concerning what the FED should have been doing 1930-33 ...

... and that is exactly why this country is in such bad shape economically! Bernanke was fighting the wrong war!

[Our current economic problems] are not due to a lack of money available to lend, but to a lack of faith in the ability of borrowers to repay their debts. The Fed has gone about as if the problem is a shortage of liquidity. That is not the basic problem. The basic problem for the markets is [uncertainty] that balance sheets are credible. -- Anna Schwartz, Our central bankers and our Treasury Department are getting it wrong again, The Wall Street Journal October 18, 2008

Note: Anna Schwartz co-authored, with Milton Friedman, A Monetary History of the United States (1963), the definitive account of how misguided monetary policy turned the stock-market crash of 1929 into the Great Depression.