Guest Post by
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:
Thank you for your service Dr. Bernanke.
For related articles, see:
“Revolution is Coming” – The Top 20 Responses to Jon Hilsenrath’s Idiotic WSJ Article
Bernanke’s Not Wasting Any Time – Earns $250,000+ for a Speech in Abu Dhabi
Elizabeth Warren Confronts Eric Holder, Ben Bernanke and Mary Jo White on Bankster Immunity
The Federal Reserve Refuses to Provide Names Requested by Congress in Probe
In Liberty,
Michael Krieger
To use one of Denninger’s favorites, Bernanke should go fuck himself with a rusty chainsaw.
Sad to say, but half the people that have been Grubered still don’t get it. My son, a liberal, is an example. He thinks the Dem’s care about the ‘little guy’.
I’m on my phone now so I don’t know how to post this article + video. At the Daily Sheeple website there is a video called …. Wait ,We don’t have to pay Federal income taxes….
Take a watch .What do you Think?
This is not a battle over the past. It’s a battle over the present and the future. Bernanke’s Op-Ed attempts to justify ex-post facto massive intervention into the private economy so that it becomes a staple of everyday life in the US.
It’s rather pathetic that this little man has to author his own panegyric.
Latest news flash: Bernanke says he doesn’t think the economy can weather 4 quarter-point increases. After almost 8 years?
Well, I’ll go ahead and admit it. I had to google the word panegyric and I found out it means just what the context clues led me to believe it would mean.
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By Jeffrey Snider of Alhambra Investment Partners
How Revisionism Saves Bernanke
A shorter version of my prior post would have exclusively directed to Bernanke’s oped in yesterday’s Wall Street Journal; specifically one passage. If you haven’t heard, the former Fed chair has written a memoir that glorifies his courage and intellectual fortitude in overcoming a historical barrage of criticism (his perspective). Clearly, he feels that was unearned though by count and construction of his latter work a sinking worry on that part has surely set in. As Greenspan, the goal can only be rehabilitation of his reputation by selective highlighting (which, obviously, you wouldn’t need to do if you were confident in your position).
Most of the oped has been sufficiently challenged but I haven’t seen anyone take him at his own word right from the start.
What the Fed can do is two things: First, by mitigating recessions, monetary policy can try to ensure that the economy makes full use of its resources, especially the workforce. High unemployment is a tragedy for the jobless, but it is also costly for taxpayers, investors and anyone interested in the health of the economy.
He goes on to score his own efforts in the years after the recession while conspicuously omitting this first criterion. The performance of monetary policy is at least arguable during the “recovery” (though not especially convincing), but on this count it is inarguable, undeniable and incontrovertible – he failed spectacularly. In other words, if monetary policy can “mitigate recessions” why didn’t it? Bernanke has been given hero status based solely upon the other end, namely what happened in the worst days without ever explaining why there were worst days! Curiously (not really), that point is never answered in his work (not just todays).
If monetary policy was so effective then why did he clearly fail to use it in 2008, because if it was as effective as he claims there never would have been a Great Recession. And if it wasn’t properly deployed because he could not understand and appreciate the full scope of what was coming, then it is useless to be so dependent on fallibility in the first place. His whole claim to such honored glory is based on a lie; that all that counts was what he did after. It is as revisionist as it is constructive in how his legacy should properly be viewed. More than that, it is entirely purposeful about what we should still expect of central banking, central bankers and their ultimate impotence (on full display in 2008, 2011-12 and yet again in 2015).
The US economy, for all the supposed magic of monetary policy, got that “tragedy” of high unemployment anyway – a manifestation that clearly continues in any truly honest assessment of the recovery. Bernanke claimed to be the fastest, most useful gun in the West, so much so that the town neglected basic and personal security, but then he only used it after the black hat (market, in the orthodox view) bad guy pillages the local bank, burns down several saloons and steals all the horses; and still he expects to be treated as a hero, symbolically emptying his revolver only as that bad guy passed beyond range instead riding off into the sunset.
Most Americans can see the spoiling incongruity of his grandeur. He claims, somehow, to defend monetary policy as it supposedly removes and prevents all the really bad downside at the same time the world is still rebuilding from the last one while seriously contemplating the next one. As 2008 proved, timing was never his strong point; as his oped proves, duplicity is.
The tweets to Bernanke are awesome.
http://www.zerohedge.com/news/2015-10-07/ask-courageous-ben-bernanke-anything-courtesy-wsj