Last week, the Federal Reserve uploaded a video to YouTube of its Chairman delivering a lecture on the recent and ongoing financial crisis.
David Duke and his fellow travellers believe Ben Bernanke and his chums at the Federal Reserve are arch-conspirators and architects of the New World Order. This video, which runs to around an hour and a quarter, should disavow anyone of that notion. Delivered to a theatre of students from George Washington University, what we actually see is a career academic waffling on about interest rates and his take on Quantitative Easing. This is a term he does not like, but the results? Well, they managed to reduce interest rates, which helped a lot of sectors of the economy, but not the housing market. When he talks about selling assets, what does he really mean? Shuffling around pieces of paper, that is the bottom line.
The Federal Reserve has two mandates, he says: maximum employment and price stability/low inflation. While the latter is certainly desirable, what does full employment actually mean?
At about 25 and a half minutes he comes out with an amazing piece of sophistry:
when the Fed buys assets as part of a QE programme, we’re not actually spending money, we’re buying assets which will at some point be sold back to the market.
Perhaps Chairman Bernanke would care to explain to America’s businessmen and the rest of us how it is possible to buy assets without spending money? Heck, if we were able to do that, it would solve all our problems.
The tragic thing is that almost all economists and politicians think like this. They are unable to think outside the box, which is clearly what is needed when we have a financial system that rests on a sea of irredeemable debt, and where creating employment is considered more important than creating wealth and distributing it to the whole of society.
This video is actually part 4 of the series. It is clear from this that Bernanke has no solutions to the problems the American economy faces, though he may just have happened on a cure for insomnia.
[The above review was first published April 4, 2012.]
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