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STONE MOUNTAIN, Georgia (Reuters) - The U.S. economy has yet to fully recover from the effects of the financial crisis, and regulators must continue to find new ways to strengthen the banking system, Federal Reserve Chairman Ben Bernanke said on Monday. "The heavy human and economic costs of the crisis underscore the importance of taking all necessary steps to avoid a repeat of the events of the past few years," Bernanke told a group of economists and finance experts at a conference sponsored by the Federal Reserve Bank of Atlanta.

No, the real reason the attacks on Mr. Bernanke from the right are so destructive is that they’re an effort to bully the Fed into doing exactly the wrong thing. The attackers want the Fed to slam on the brakes when it should be stepping on the gas; they want the Fed to choke off recovery when it should be doing much more to accelerate recovery. Fundamentally, the right wants the Fed to obsess over inflation, when the truth is that we’d be better off if the Fed paid less attention to inflation and more attention to unemployment. Indeed, a...

Italian police said on Friday they had seized about $6 trillion of fake U.S. Treasury bonds in Switzerland, and issued arrest warrants for eight people accused of international fraud and other financial crimes. The operation, co-ordinated by prosecutors from the southern Italian city of Potenza, was carried out by Italian and Swiss authorities after a year-long investigation, an Italian police source said.

The U.S. Federal Reserve said Wednesday it will not raise interest rates until at least late 2014, even later than investors expected, in an effort to support a sluggish economic recovery. Without making major shifts to its outlook for the economy, the central bank described the unemployment rate as still elevated and said it expects inflation to remain at levels consistent with stable prices. “I think what they are seeing is that the rate of growth is not sufficient to bring down the unemployment rate,” said Brian Dolan, chief strategist at Forex.com. The Fed depicted business investment as having slowed,...

So far, during the presidency of Barack Obama, the price of a gallon of gasoline has jumped 83 percent, according to data from the Bureau of Labor Statistics. (AP Photo) During the same period, the price of ground beef has gone up 24 percent and price of bacon has gone up 22 percent. When Obama entered the White House in January 2009, the city average price for one gallon of regular unleaded gasoline was $1.79, according to the BLS. (The figures are in nominal dollars: not adjusted for inflation.) Five months later in June, unleaded gasoline was $2.26 per gallon,...

As the Federal Reserve downgraded its economic projections, Chairman Ben S. Bernanke admitted that the central bank's board was in the same distressing position as the average American family — frustrated by the slow recovery, limited in its options and largely reduced to hoping for the best. "I certainly understand that many people are dissatisfied with the state of the economy," Bernanke told reporters Wednesday when asked about the Occupy Wall Street protests. "I'm dissatisfied with the state of the economy." The Fed noted in its official statement after its two-day meeting that economic conditions strengthened somewhat from July through...

To know what is wrong with the Federal Reserve, one must first understand the nature of money. Money is like any other good in our economy that emerges from the market to satisfy the needs and wants of consumers. Its particular usefulness is that it helps facilitate indirect exchange, making it easier for us to buy and sell goods because there is a common way of measuring their value. Money is not a government phenomenon, and it need not and should not be managed by government. When central banks like the Fed manage money they are engaging in price fixing,...

Politics: You'd think a Republican debate on the economy would be a perfect time to blast Obama policies as an unmitigated disaster. Yet Obama escaped largely unscathed. Whom do these folks think they're running against? If aliens landed Tuesday night and managed to find the GOP debate on Bloomberg TV, they might think the GOP candidates were running against Ben Bernanke, someone named Dodd-Frank, Obama-Care and China. Newt Gingrich focused his ire, for example, on Bernanke, saying he's "the first person to fire." Michele Bachmann went on about Dodd-Frank, calling it "the jobs and housing destruction act." Rick Santorum said...

Newt Gingrich is asked about the Occupy Wall Street movement at the Bloomberg debate in New Hampshire: New Gingrich: "If they want to change things, the first thing to do is fire Bernanke, who is a disaster as chairman of the Federal Reserve. The second person to fire is Geithner. The fact is, in both the Bush and the Obama administrations the fix has been in. And I think it's perfectly reasonable to be angry. But let's be clear about who put the fix in. The fix was put in by the federal government. If you want to put people...

Billionaire investor George Soros said he sympathizes with the protesters who have camped out near Wall Street in New York and inspired similar anti-corporate demonstrations in other major cities across the United S While announcing a $40-million aid pledge at the United Nations for rural African development, Soros told media that he understood the protesters’ rage over big government bailout for banks "Actually I can understand their [protesters] sentiment, frankly," he said. "And at the same time the decision not to inject capital into the banks, but to effectively relieve them of their bad assets and then allow them to...

WASHINGTON (MarketWatch) — The Federal Reserve on Wednesday, acting in the face of a weak economic outlook, decided to start a program to twist the yield curve by swapping shorter-maturity government securities for longer-dated ones. In a statement, the Fed will buy $400 billion of Treasury securities in the 6-30 year range and sell an equal amount of maturities of 3 years or less. The Fed also announced a new plan to purchase agency mortgage-backed securities with proceeds of maturing securities.

Dear Chairman Bernanke, It is our understanding that the Board Members of the Federal Reserve will meet later this week to consider additional monetary stimulus proposals. We write to express our reservations about any such measures. Respectfully, we submit that the board should resist further extraordinary intervention in the U.S. economy, particularly without a clear articulation of the goals of such a policy, direction for success, ample data proving a case for economic action and quantifiable benefits to the American people. It is not clear that the recent round of quantitative easing undertaken by the Federal Reserve has facilitated economic...

The number of Americans filing new claims for jobless benefits rose unexpectedly last week in a sign concerns about a weak economy were sapping an already beleaguered labor market, data showed on Thursday. Applications for unemployment benefits climbed to 428,000 in the week ending September10 from an upwardly revised 417,000 the prior week, the Labor Department said. It was the second straight week in which claims rose. Wall Street analysts had been looking for a dip to 410,000. Excluding one week in early August, claims have held above 400,000 since early April. A Labor Department official said there was no...

In the run-up to the financial crisis, the Federal Reserve fueled the housing bubble with its easy money policy. Now, we know that after the crisis struck, the Fed secretly propped up elite bankers all the way from Wall Street to Brussels to the Central Bank of Libya. A Bloomberg news investigation found that while the Treasury Department was pumping $700 billion into banks under the Troubled Asset Relief Program, the Fed was covertly operating its own bailout program — the biggest in American history. The Fed's Shadow TARP issued $1.2 trillion in loans to domestic and foreign banks from...

Former presidential candidate and Forbes magazine editor Steve Forbes tells Newsmax that President Obama’s planned economic reforms are “the definition of insanity” — repeating failed policies in the hopes that somehow they will become successful. In a wide-ranging exclusive interview, Forbes also declares that Federal Reserve Chairman Ben Bernanke should have resigned a long time ago, says Obama will be a one-term president, and looks for significant and positive reforms in Washington after the 2012 elections. He also predicts the United States will make an “astonishing” move and return to a gold standard in the next five years, and says...

FOR the last three years we have been told repeatedly by government officials that funneling hundreds of billions of dollars to large and teetering banks during the credit crisis was necessary to save the financial system, and beneficial to Main Street... --snip-- Bloomberg reported that the Fed had provided a stunning $1.2 trillion to large global financial institutions at the peak of its crisis lending in December 2008. --snip-- In 2008, the Royal Bank of Scotland received $84.5 billion, and Dexia, a Belgian lender, borrowed $58.5 billion from the Fed at... --snip-- Mr. Todd also questioned the Fed’s decision to...

The Federal Reserve has done all it can for now to get the U.S. economy back on track. Now it's time to simply wait for it to heal. That was the message delivered by Federal Reserve Chairman Ben Bernanke in a widely anticipated speech Friday to an annual gathering of bankers at Jackson Hole, Wyo. "It may take some time, but we can reasonably expect to see a return to growth rates and (better) employment levels," Bernanke said. "This economic healing will take a while, and there may be setbacks along the way." The Fed chairman stopped short of any...

Many politicians and media pundits who should know better are not thinking very rationally about Governor Rick Perry’s recent critical remarks concerning Federal Reserve Chairman Ben Bernanke and further additions to the nation’s money supply. It turns out that a constitutional analysis adds weight to Governor Perry’s instructive remarks. As reported, those remarks on August 15th were: “If this guy prints more money between now and the election, I dunno what y’all would do to him in Iowa but we would treat him pretty ugly down in Texas. Printing more money to play politics at this particular time in American...

Super-low interest rates haven't done what they usually do after a recession. They haven't ignited economic growth or revived the home market or persuaded consumers to spend freely again. They have, though, caused misery for retirees and others who depend on interest income. Such income plummeted 27 percent from 2008 to last year. Now, some economists worry that low rates might be hurting the economy itself -- defeating the purpose of the Federal Reserve's low-rate policies. When savers earn less, they spend less. And spending by individuals drives about 70 percent of the U.S. economy. Those concerns arise 2 1/2...