AGREED...time to stop this sh*t...to hell with bullwinkle berneckie!
It’s called “Economic Control”. Look to the USSR to see how this works. “Economic Control” is exactly what they did.
Sarah Palin is the first high profile Republican to come out and say “Hold your horses, Bucko” to Bernanke. Where’s the GOP Leadership? Thank heavens for Sarah!
“And if it doesn’t work, what do we do then? Print even more money? What’s the end game here? Where will all this money printing on an unprecedented scale take us? Do we have any guarantees that QE2 won’t be followed by QE3, 4, and 5, until eventually – inevitably – no one will want to buy our debt anymore? What happens if the Fed becomes not just the buyer of last resort, but the buyer of only resort?”
Well said, Sarah. This might already be happening.
The Mises Institute (http://mises.org/daily/4798) had an interesting profile on Bernanke, detailing his educational background: undergraduate in economics at Harvard; Ph.D. in economics from MIT. Apparently, all of his academic work and writings were devoted to the notion that the cause of economic downturns (including the Great Depression) was lack of bank credit:
“The relevant issue for today is that Bernanke essentially believes that it is the Federal Reserve’s job to bail out financial institutions in order to maintain the channels of credit and to prevent other “nonmonetary” factors from negatively impacting aggregate demand. This explains Bernanke’s swift acting to bail out financial firms like Bear Sterns and AIG, the nationalization of Fannie Mae and Freddie Mac, backstopping whole markets such as money-market mutual funds, and absorbing vast quantities of toxic assets onto the Federal Reserve’s balance sheet.
In preparing for this lecture, I began to realize just how obvious a choice Bernanke was for chairman of the Fed. From the point of view of banks, corporations, and Wall Street — also known as the “corporatocracy,” a government run for the interests of big corporations — who would be better than someone who literally wrote the book on bailing out the banks and Wall Street during a financial crisis?”
I think that Mark Thornton, the author of the above statement, is correct. The depressing thing is that many, perhaps most, academics and mainstream economists are more or less in agreement with Bernanke’s basic position, which is this: economic growth is driven and sustained by consumer spending — so called “aggregate demand.” If aggregate demand falls, then so will economic activity in general, and it will be the responsibility of government, via its central bank, to perform the spending in the economy that the consumers (for some unknown reason — “fear”, “irrationality”, etc.) refuse to do. Keynes himself claimed that it makes no difference what the government spends money on — “might as well be pyramids” he said — just as long as it spends.
This view, in fact, is false, and it was one of the achievements of the Austrian School to show this (see Austrian Business Cycle Theory). However, as long as the myth persists that growth is the result of consumption, I doubt that there will be a serious attempt to “End the Fed” even if Ron Paul manages to audit it.