Obsessively focusing on the Fed operations makes no sense for both financial (monetary and fiscal) and political reasons:
1. Private and public debt creates the money that the Fed "prints" / monetizes. In the last 3 years the amount of public debt has exploded (about $5T added and accelerating) so the problem clearly lies with the irresponsible profligate government spending and minting ("printing") huge amounts of debt, not with the Fed's "printing" / monetizing the public debt. The Fed should not be accountable and be made a political scapegoat for the irresponsible insane fiscal policies and economically harmful legislations and regulations. The Fed is not negatively contributing to the public debt, in fact it occasionally returns "excess" profits to the Treasury thereby reducing the public debt / deficits.
2. USDollar fell 40% under Bush-43 - with all-Republican Congress, Greenspan as the Fed Chairman, before anybody ever heard of TARP or QE (unless they studied Japan's economic policies of two "lost decades"). Oil prices and corn prices went higher since 2007-2008 without any QEx, but because of stupid fiscal policies, regulations and laws.
Greece, Portugal, Spain, Italy etc. do not have their own independent central banks (the "Fed") able to "print" their own drachmas, liras, pesetas (Europe's central bank ECB does the "printing") yet they are in horrible economic malaise and debt spirals - because of their socialist governments and/or spend-thrift fiscal policies. Just because the U.S. has independent central banks and its currency is the world's reserve currency and the de facto currency of several countries who peg their currency to USD$ doesn't mean that the Fed should be a scapegoat for politicos who spend the public treasure with abandon.
3. Politically, by focusing on the Fed "printing" money or "quantitative easing" only distracts from the politicians spending public money and creating insane economically counterproductive laws, bureaucracies and regulations (GSEs Fannie-Freddie, HUD, Community Reinvestment Act, Sarbanes-Oxley, Dodd-Frank, just to name a few). By blaming the Fed for all the financial / economic problems we are absolving and give a pass and blank checks to politicians who are only happy to point the finger at the Fed as the source of all evil - we are actually helping Bernie Sanders, Sander Levine, Barney Frank, Nancy Pelosi, Obama et al to divert the blame from themselves and their policies for current economic problems, unemployment or debasement of the currency.
It also serves to confuse the GOP office candidates who feel obligated to toe the line on bashing the Fed. Bernanke is not the enemy. We have met the enemy and he is us.
In other words, focusing on the Fed and obsessing with its operations only puts on display our financial and political naïveté and only works to let off the hook and help our enemies... which they keep exploiting in their campaigns and legislative process.
That’s bullshite. The Fed is a puppet of whatever administration is in power, despite any and all pretensions to the contrary, and ESPECIALLY in the current circumstances. The Treasury can’t create money without the willing partnership of the Federal Reserve. The Federal Reserve hasn’t been legit since at least Volckers time, and may not have been so long before him.
Since maintaining the strength of the dollar is one of the Feds two prime directives, of course they should be blamed.
The government could not spend so wildly, if the Fed didn't print so wildly. Without a quickly growing money supply, interest rates would go up, and spending would be limited.
The other prime directive for the Fed is to maintain low unemployment. They fail at that too.
And I agree with the previous response to this, the head of the Fed is a political appointee and the Fed has been quite responsive to it's political overlords over the years.