The country is in the best of hands. And if you believe that, I’ve got a great deal on swamp land in downtown Phoenix.
Several months ago President Present Obama announced that Ben Bernanke would be leaving his job as Chairman of the Federal Reserve when his current term runs out in January. Yellen will be confirmed in a walk because I suspect the Senate is terrified that the President will send the Brownshirt Brigade to take them prisoner and hold them for ransom in the WWII memorial where they’ll never be seen again.
OK, so now you’ve got the party line. Shy. Smart. Whatever.
If you don’t know, the Federal Reserve has kept us out of an official depression for at least the last three years by printing money (or digitizing it), to keep the stock market going up. The Chairman sets policy at the Fed and it’s a very important job. Probably – for the last five years or so – the most important job in the US. With that in mind, think about this from ZeroHedge.
From the NYT which captured a moment of a 2010 FCIC hearing:
Ms. Yellen told the Financial Crisis Inquiry Commission in 2010 that she and other San Francisco Fed officials pressed Washington for new guidance, sharing the problems they were seeing. But Ms. Yellen did not raise those concerns publicly, and she said that she had not explored the San Francisco Fed’s ability to act unilaterally, taking the view that it had to do what Washington said.
“For my own part,” Ms. Yellen said, “I did not see and did not appreciate what the risks were with securitization, the credit ratings agencies, the shadow banking system, the S.I.V.’s — I didn’t see any of that coming until it happened.” Her startled interviewers noted that almost none of the officials who testified had offered a similar acknowledgment of an almost universal failure.
At least Yellen is honest in admitting her complete lack of vision and failure to not only stop but see what was coming, which is more than we can say about Ben “Subprime is contained” Bernanke.
Of course, this time her vision of the future “will be different.“
If that doesn’t give you pause, THIS should scare the hell out of you, from Forbes.
Yellen’s nomination will bring up lots of questions to a verbally incontinent punditry about the good or bad of her policies, but that’s realistically to miss the point. Yellen wanted to be the Fed Chairman, Yellen, like Bernanke and Greenspan before her, politicked to be the Fed Chairman. Policies and beliefs matter, but the citizenry should fear Yellen simply because she wanted to run the Fed. She wanted to run an entity that’s always been wrong…
Implicit in Yellen wanting to run the Fed is a belief that the cost of credit, easily the most important price in the world after the dollar, should be manipulated by her and other supposedly wise individuals laboring alongside her. Think about the stunning arrogance that underpins such a belief.
“Stunning arrogance.” Seems to fit right in with our Emperor Wannabe and the National Park Service Brownshirts.
