The New Idiots: Bernanke and The Fed

Congress and the Executive Branch are filled with idiots.  We shrug acceptance--for the time being.

Now the Fed joins!  Ain't life grand??

...a book by Robert Hetzel, a senior economist at Federal Reserve Bank of Richmond, says it wasn’t Bushonomics or greedy bankers or broken markets that caused the Great Recession. In The Great Recession: Market Failure or Policy Failure, Hetzel pins the blame squarely on the Federal Reserve and Team Bernanke.

Oh, the downturn first started with “correction of an excess in the housing stock and a sharp increase in energy prices” — the housing bust and the oil shock. Indeed, those two things were enough, in Hetzel’s view, to cause a “moderate recession” beginning in December 2007.

But only a moderate one. It was the Fed’s monetary policy miscues after the downturn began that turned a run-of-the-mill downturn into a once-in-a century disaster.

According to the book, the Fed kept its discount-rate and psychologically 'tightened' it through hawkish yammering; it should have been loosened, instead.

Never forget:  Bernanke, who oversaw all this, is an "expert" on the Great Depression.