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The troubling side of Ben Bernanke He has saved the world but he helped cause the crisis in the first place, writes Ambrose Evans-Pritchard. By Ambrose Evans-Pritchard Published: 8:29PM BST 25 Aug 2009 Comments 35 | Comment on this article Ben Bernanke has proved himself a heroic fire-fighter, saving world from a calamitous spiral into debt deflation by showering markets with liquidity. A good thing too. He helped cause the raging fire of 2007-2009 in the first place. As a Princeton professor and then a junior Federal Reserve governor, Mr Bernanke was the intellectual architect of his predecessor Alan Greenspan's...

World's economies tumbling like dominoes /snip By Bill Fleckenstein MSN Money Lately, I have been struck by how bleak and black the newspapers have been in their coverage of the economy. Not that I've been surprised, but one can never know when events in the economy will coalesce into the news that causes the masses to realize how difficult the environment is. In reading the papers, it was obvious to me that it's becoming clear to everyone that "the next time down" is well under way, though the average person wouldn't call it that. 1980-82 versus now I was trying...

The Fed Is Out of Ammunition A discredited dollar is a likely outcome of the current crisis. By CHRISTOPHER WOOD With an estimated $4 trillion in housing wealth and $9 trillion in stock-market wealth destroyed so far in the United States, there is little doubt that we are witnessing a classic debt-deflation bust at work, characterized by falling prices, frozen credit markets and plummeting asset values. Those who want to understand the mechanism might ponder Irving Fisher's comment in 1933: When it comes to booms gone bust, "over-investment and over-speculation are often important; but they would have far less serious...

Introduction by Steve Keen:The subject Financial Economics at the University of Western Sydney introduces students to the proposition that the money supply is endogenous?determined by interactions between the finance sector and the economy rather than being independently determined by the Federal Reserve. Irving Fisher?s analysis of the causes of the Great Depression figures prominently in this subject, and in this year?s essay students were asked to:"Explain Fisher's Debt Deflation Theory of Great Depressions, and in the light of it provide an evaluation of the economic history of America for the past two decades, and predict the USA's economic performance till...