"How the Fed Saved the Economy" - the Gospel According to St. Bernanke

[Occam's Banana]

Ave Bernanke! (Teh Bernank's new book comes out today ...)

h/t Karen De Coster @ LRC: https://www.lewrockwell.com/lrc-blog/saved-by-the-fed-again/

Saved by the Fed. Again.

The lack of self-introspection combined with severe arrogance = Ben Bernanke exclaiming Fed Victory from the shrill zone. This story, How the Fed Saved the Economy: The Central Bank Did Its Job. What About Everyone Else?, is akin to an arsonist setting your house on fire, rescuing the cat and calling 911, and when the home occupants escape from the fire our villain triumphantly claims he saved their home structure when the fire department departs after having successfully doused the fire before the entire house was burned to the ground.

How the Fed Saved the Economy
http://www.wsj.com/articles/how-the-fed-saved-the-economy-1443996826
Ben S. Bernanke (04 October 2015)

Full employment without inflation is in sight. The central bank did its job. What about everyone else?

For the first time in nearly a decade, the Federal Reserve is considering raising its target interest rate, which would end a long period of near-zero rates. Like the cessation of large-scale asset purchases in October 2014, that action will be an important milestone in the unwinding of extraordinary monetary policies, adopted during my tenure as Fed chairman, to help the economy recover from a historic financial crisis. As such, it’s a good time to evaluate the results of those measures, and to consider where policy makers should go from here.

[... continued at link: http://www.wsj.com/articles/how-the-fed-saved-the-economy-1443996826 ...]

To get around the subscription/log-in prompt, you can access the article via google:
https://www.google.com/search?q=wsj+bernanke+how+the+fed+saved+the+economy

 

[Ronin Truth]

how the fed caused the great depression

https://www.google.com/search?hl=en....1ac.1.34.heirloom-hp..14.27.4485.wIDDSg0rt_E

 

[phill4paul]

Would I find this under 'adult fiction' or 'children's story time' aisle?

 

[Madison320]

I just read that Bernanke says the govt didn't do its part in stimulating the economy after the crash. I guess borrowing 9 trillion and almost doubling the national debt wasn't enough.

 

[Ronin Truth]

I just read that Bernanke says the govt didn't do its part in stimulating the economy after the crash. I guess borrowing 9 trillion and almost doubling the national debt wasn't enough.

Or just plain flat out wrong. As you can easily tell by it not working.

 

[Occam's Banana]

Would I find this under 'adult fiction' or 'children's story time' aisle?

Neither. Look in the Occult/Astrology section, somewhere among the alchemy texts (specifically, those dealing with reversing the effects of the philosopher's stone ...)

 

[Madison320]

Or just plain flat out wrong. As you can easily tell by it not working.

The problem is that not only did the stimulus not work, it left us in a MUCH deeper hole. So when it wears off the economy is going to be in much worse shape then when they started the stimulus back in 2009.

 

[Lucille]

"The Courage to Act." YHGTBFKM

They should have started with him
http://voxday.blogspot.com/2015/10/they-should-have-started-with-him.html

Ben Bernanke says financial executives should have been arrested and charged with crimes:

With publication of his memoir, The Courage to Act, on Tuesday by W.W. Norton & Co., Bernanke has some thoughts about what went right and what went wrong. For one thing, he says that more corporate executives should have gone to jail for their misdeeds. The Justice Department and other law-enforcement agencies focused on indicting or threatening to indict financial firms, he notes, "but it would have been my preference to have more investigation of individual action, since obviously everything what went wrong or was illegal was done by some individual, not by an abstract firm."

He also offers a detailed rebuttal to critics who argue the government could and should have done more to rescue Lehman Brothers from bankruptcy in the worst weekend of a tumultuous time. "We were very, very determined not to let it collapse," he says. "But we were out of bullets at that point."

Still, he does acknowledge some missteps by the Fed. Analysts were slow to realize just how serious the economic downturn would become, and he faults himself for not doing more to explain to Americans why it was in their interests to rescue the financial firms that had helped cause it.

...The idea that it was essential to rescue the financial firms that are still preying on the American economy and weighing it down is simply nonsensical. The Federal Reserve didn't succeed in anything except kicking the can down the road and ensure that the next crisis will be even more severe.

 

[Occam's Banana]

[Bernanke] says that [some people] should have gone to jail for their misdeeds. [... H]e notes, "but it would have been my preference to have more investigation of individual action, since obviously everything what went wrong or was illegal was done by some individual, not by an abstract firm."

Hmmmmm ... he might be on to something there ...

 

[Lucille]

Welcome to the Banana Republic – Highlighting the Comment Section of Bernanke’s WSJ Propaganda Piece
http://www.theburningplatform.com/2...nt-section-of-bernankes-wsj-propaganda-piece/

There’s nothing like the comment section when it comes to Federal Reserve propaganda in the editorial pages of the Wall Street Journal. Liberty Blitzkrieg readers will remember the last time the WSJ published a disconnected piece of Central Bank stroking garbage from Fed propagandist John Hilsenrath, and the riotous anger which ensued in the comment section. If you missed it, I strongly suggest taking a read: “Revolution is Coming” – The Top 20 Responses to Jon Hilsenrath’s Idiotic WSJ Article.

Fast forward a few months, and here we have Ben “the courage to bail out billionaires” Bernanke writing an almost unreadable piece of propaganda in the WSJ titled “How the Fed Saved the Economy.”

At this point in a post I’d typically highlight the more egregious parts of an Op-Ed, but this one is so bad, so poorly written and completely uninteresting, there’s really no point. If you feel like wasting two minutes of your life go ahead and read it yourself, but it appears to me that it was put together in a couple of seconds by an intern instructed to boost book sales.

What’s far more interesting, is the comment section. Apparently there are 591 comments as of this writing, and if the first page is any indication, WSJ readers are not on the same page as Bernanke. And that’s putting it lightly.

So what do Americans think of our hero? Here are a few examples from the first page alone:

Click through. They're still coming too: http://www.wsj.com/articles/how-the-fed-saved-the-economy-1443996826

 

[Suzanimal]

FFS...

Ben's Friends

OCTOBER 10, 2015
Joseph T. Salerno

Ben Bernanke is officially a celebrity. The New York Post's venerable celebrity gossip section Page Six carried news of former NYC Mayor Michael Bloomberg's fete for Ben in honor of the publication of his memoir Courage to Act. In attendance were many of Ben's best--or at least most grateful--friends from Wall Street. These included: NY Fed President Billl Dudley; JPMorgan Chase's Jamie Diamond; J. Tomilson Hill, Blackstone Group's Vice Chairman and President and CEO of its hedge fund group; Robert Rubin, former Clinton administration Treasury Secretary and former director and senior counselor of Citigroup during the financial crisis and subsequent bailout; Ralph Shlosstein, co-founder of Blackrock, "the largest asset manager on the planet," and now CEO of Evercore investment banking advisory firm; Glenn Hutchins of Silver Lakes Partners, a huge private technology investment fund; CNBC's senior economic report Steve Liesman; Anthony Scaramucci, former Goldman Sachs and Lehman Brothers banker and a co-founder and co-managing partner of Skybridge Capital, a hedge fund seeding firm.

With no disrespect intended to former Chairman Bernanke, it is unlikely that he won such rich and powerful friends with his scintillating personality, arcane academic publications, or fashionable haircut.

https://mises.org/blog/bens-friends-0