Bernanke's Hammer

He also failed to acknowledge that countries like Germany, which have refrained from looting their taxpayers to bail out the wealthy (much to Paul Krugman’s consternation ), have citizens who are doing better than we are because of their social safety net.  I could find no mention of any tent city for the homeless in Germany.  There is a growing number of them in the U.S.

Bernanke’s hollow attempts at populism – his declared anger at AIG for their misuse of tax money; his insistence that he is Main Street and not Wall Street – only underscored the impotence of the Federal Reserve as he has configured it.

Bernanke insisted that the trillions of dollars that he has authorized for bank bail outs are newly printed bills and not taxpayer money. That’s because there aren’t enough taxpayer dollars to go around. His unchallenged insinuation was that the new money is therefore cost-free for the nation, like it exists in some parallel universe.  Are we being punked?

Bernanke’s most mind blowing assertion during the 60 Minutes interview was the analogy he used to explain the necessity for the tax payer bailouts of the wealthy. He said it was like a neighbor’s house on fire because the owner had accidentally fallen asleep with a lit cigarette.  “The fire might endanger your house, too, so you call the fire department.”  

Oh, really?

Here’s the real analogy: A group of thugs breaks into your house and deliberately burns it down while the police look the other way.  The last thing you expect is to be forced to pay those delinquents for their smoke inhalation.

What you do expect is help while you rebuild the house: unemployment insurance for the duration, health care coverage, pension and social security protection, credit guaranteed by the government at reasonable rates. You want better police protection and severe punishment for the miscreants.

It’s OK with us if Wall Street, the banks-too-big-to-fail, and all the gamblers that kept them in business, wash into the Atlantic. We know that the bankers will be replaced by more responsible owners, by default. They could not possibly be replaced with LESS responsible owners.

Sixty Minutes interviewer Scott Pelley called Bernanke the smartest kid in the class, just like the media labeled Geithner a few months back.  

Couldn’t make this up.

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