Free Republic

A former Federal Reserve chairman who dismissed concerns about the 2000s housing bubble attempted to squash fears of a 1970s-style inflation crisis under President Joe Biden. Ben Bernanke penned a ludicrous op-ed for The New York Times headlined: “Inflation Isn’t Going to Bring Back the 1970s,” after news broke that inflation skyrocketed to a 40-year high of 8.6 percent year-over-year in May. His main argument had the audacity to varnish the so-called expertise of political leaders and the Fed. “[T]oday’s monetary policymakers understand that as we wait for supply constraints to ease, which they will eventually, the Fed can help...

Ben Bernanke, who served as Federal Reserve Chairman under Presidents Bush and Obama, warns that the U.S. economy is headed for a repeat of 1970s “stagflation.” Economists refer to a period of low economic growth, high inflation, and rising unemployment as “stagflation.” “Even under the benign scenario,” the U.S. is likely to go through “a period in the next year or two where growth is low, unemployment is at least up a little bit, and inflation is still high,” Bernanke told the New York Times. “So you could call that stagflation.” That “benign scenario” is if current Fed chair Jerome...

David Einhorn, manager of the $10 billion Greenlight Capital Inc., said he found a recent dinner conversation with former Federal Reserve Chairman Ben S. Bernanke scary. "I got to ask him all these questions that had been on my mind for a long time," Einhorn said in an interview today with Erik Schatzker and Stephanie Ruhle on Bloomberg Television, referring to a March 26 dinner with Bernanke. "It was sort of frightening because the answers were not better than I thought they would be." Einhorn, 45, has been critical of Bernanke's willingness to leave interest rates near zero for more...

Jerry Powell apparently doesn’t get it. The new head of the Federal Reserve isn’t supposed to imply that he doesn’t work for Wall Street. And he’s not supposed to say, as he did the other day in front of Congress, that “we don’t manage the stock market — we manage stable prices and maximum employment.” That’s not what Wall Street and the stock market want to hear. And that was proven by the fact that the stock market dropped sharply on Tuesday when Powell was speaking. And Powell’s comments were one of the reasons Wall Street’s pros couldn’t get a...

Former Federal Reserve Chairman Ben Bernanke says some Wall Street executives should have gone to jail for their roles in the financial crisis that gripped the country in 2008 and triggered the Great Recession. Billions of dollars in fines have been levied against major banks and brokerage firms in the wake of the economic meltdown that was in large part triggered by reckless lending and shady securities dealings that blew up a housing bubble. But in an interview with USA Today published Sunday, Bernanke said he thinks that in addition to the corporations, individuals should have been held more accountable....

A notorious al Qaeda magazine is encouraging lone-wolf terrorist attacks on U.S. economic leaders, including Bill Gates, Michael Bloomberg and Warren Buffett. The list in Inspire magazine also included industrialist brothers Charles and David Koch, internet entrepreneur Larry Ellison, and casino magnate Sheldon Adelson. A prominent economist was also on the list but asked that his name be withheld. Federal Reserve chairman Ben Bernanke was named, though not Janet Yellen, who succeeded him. Also pictured was Jim Walton, one of the heirs to the Wal-Mart fortune, although he was misidentified in the caption as his late father, Sam Walton. Several...

The situation in Athens seems to have calmed down, but former Federal Reserve Chairman Ben Bernanke thinks Europe has an even bigger issue to worry about: Germany. In a blog post on Friday, Bernanke wrote that the failure of the eurozone as a whole is very much related to the "highly asymmetric outcomes" among member nations. In other words, Bernanke is attributing Europe's woes to the fact that countries like Germany are benefiting at the expense of the monetary union's weaker members, like Greece, Spain, and Italy. Bernanke points to unemployment rates as a clear sign of the disparity in...

Ah: I see that there was a Twitter exchange among Brad DeLong, James Pethokoukis, and others over why Republicans don’t acknowledge that Ben Bernanke helped the economy, and claim credit. Pethokoukis — who presumably gets to talk to quite a few Republicans from his perch at AEI — offers a fairly amazing explanation: B/c many view BB as enabling Obama’s spending and artificially propping up debt-heavy economy in need of Mellon-esque liquidation Yep: that dastardly Bernanke was preventing us from having a financial crisis, curse him. Actually, there’s a lot of evidence that this was an important part of the...

No, that is not the number of hits his blog posts got, neither is that what Ben Bernanke will make as the most recent employee of Citadel (at least not for a few years until the the eponymously named helicopter makes a landing and hyperinflation runs wild).It is also not the assets under management held by HFT titan, and Bernanke's new employer, Citadel. As Citadel reminds us in its regulatory filing with the SEC, "as of December 31, 2014, in Funds managed on a discretionary basis, we had approximately $23,804,000,000 in net assets under management."Only.So what does the number...

If there ever was a doubt that Dodd-Frank had unintended consequences the announcement that Ben Bernanke was unable to refinance his home clenched that argument for good. We know Mr. Bernanke recently lost his job as Chairman of the Federal Reserve, but we can rest assured he is capable of getting another high paying position. If Bernanke has a problem refinancing than what will face Joan Miller is Elmira, New York?We recently discussed the state of the market with Richard Koevary. Koevary is President of Blue Sky Mortgage, Inc. in Arizona where he has been a licensed mortgage broker for...

<p>You want proof that it's tough to get a mortgage? Ben Bernanke, the nation's top central banker until the start of this year, is having trouble refinancing his home.</p> <p>Bernanke spoke of his problems during an appearance Thursday at a conference in Chicago hosted by the National Investment Center for Senior Housing and Care.</p>

Just how inflexible are lending standards these days? Ben Bernanke said at a conference Thursday that he’d been unable recently to refinance his mortgage. “It’s entirely possible” that lenders “may have gone a little bit too far on mortgage credit conditions,” he said at a conference in Chicago, according to Bloomberg News. But wait. Surely a man with high income, lots of equity in his home, good credit and a solid net worth must be able to get a mortgage. Mr. Bernanke stepped down as the chairman of the Federal Reserve in January and joined the Brookings Institution as a...

The Democrat playbook for 2014, we are told, intends to focus on U.S. inequality and to suggest that only redistributive taxation will solve or even alleviate it. Certainly it's possible to reduce inequality through punitive levels of taxation—at the cost of making everybody poorer. I thus thought it worthwhile to disentangle the current causes of U.S. inequality to see how we might alleviate it by raising the incomes of the poor rather than simply depressing those of the rich. With good policies, this could even provide general economic uplift rather than depression, which would happen with redistributive tax. The policy...

Amardeep Kaleka produced and directed a documentary that claims September 11 was an inside job designed to distract the public from ET revelations.Proof of alien lifeScreenshot from Sirius trailer When 35-year-old Amardeep Kaleka recently declared his intention to run for the Democratic nomination to challenge Rep. Paul Ryan (R-Wis.) in 2014, most news coverage focused on one facet of his story: His father was one of the murder victims of the 2012 massacre at a Sikh temple in Oak Creek, Wisconsin. That murder convinced Kaleka to run as a Democrat and advocate for enhanced gun control. But during a recent...

I've always avoided reporting on the Federal Reserve. I know it's more important than much of the stuff I cover, but it's so boring. How can I succeed on TV reporting on the Fed? Fed chairs even work at being dull. Alan Greenspan said he tried to be obscure because he didn't want to spook markets. He called his obfuscation "Fedspeak." It's a far cry from the clarity of his language -- and principles -- when he was young and a disciple of libertarian Ayn Rand. Outgoing Fed Chairman Ben Bernanke and his likely successor, Janet Yellen, are almost as...

Ben Bernanke has spent half of a decade trying to coax investors out of their post-recession bunkers. Now, Congress is set to once again send them running for cover. The country will default in the coming weeks unless lawmakers reach a debt ceiling deal, but just by coming close to the edge, Congress will pull markets in the exact opposite direction than the Federal Reserve has been trying to push them. Bernanke's bid to resuscitate the economy depends on two leaps of faith. Businesses need to have enough faith in the future to ask for the big loans they need...

The billionaire investor spoke one day after the central bank surprised investors by postponing its expected wind-down of monetary stimulus, which has in five years more than tripled the Fed's balance sheet to above $3.6 trillion. "Since the panic of five years ago, he's done a terrific job," Buffett said on CNBC television in a joint interview with Brian Moynihan, chief executive of Bank of America Corp. Asked if he would reappoint Bernanke when his term expires, Buffett said: "That's what I would do." Nevertheless, at an event later Thursday afternoon at Georgetown University, Buffett said that the Fed's eventual...

On June 17, Barack Obama had one of his most awesome reality TV events of the year when he fired central bank chairman Ben Bernanke on PBS with liberal mope and host Charlie Rose moderating. “He essentially fired Ben Bernanke on the spot and gave him a fairly tepid testimonial afterward,” said former Fed Governor Laurence Meyer, in an interview on CNBC the next day. And the bankers have been in revolt ever since.  The government, meanwhile, has revised the economy’s performance downward. The newest do-over by government economists comes three months after they gave the economy one of the...

On June 17, Barack Obama had one of his most awesome reality TV events of the year when he fired central bank chairman Ben Bernanke on PBS with liberal mope and host Charlie Rose moderating. “He essentially fired Ben Bernanke on the spot and gave him a fairly tepid testimonial afterward,” said former Fed Governor Laurence Meyer, in an interview on CNBC the next day. And the bankers have been in revolt ever since.  The government, meanwhile, has revised the economy’s performance downward. The newest do-over by government economists comes three months after they gave the economy one of the...

Speaking at the Princeton University graduation in June, Federal Reserve Chairman Ben Bernanke spelled out his political philosophy: from each according to his luck, to each according to his need. He explained that meritocracies were inherently unfair, and that those who were the luckiest needed to give back to society to make the concept of meritocracy work ethically.