And you expect Bernanke to publically state this? You expect Bernanke to criticize Obama policy and further undermine confidence in the economy?
Bernanke has been almost perfect in conducting monetary policy so far, but the hard part is coming. He has learned the lessons of the 1930s discovered by Friedman and Schwartz and provided the liquidity needed in the economy. He has not fallen for the baying wolves that inflation is coming and allowed deflation to happen. My one complaint is this silliness of coming up with a new term QE for increasing the money supply.
Hard to believe that a central banker who is generally learning from the lessons of Milton Friedman is being so roundly criticized by so called conservatives. One of the key lessons of Friedman is that printing more or less green pieces of paper does not create any more land labor and capital and lead to more output. Printing green pieces of paper can only affect the price level.
All the FED can do is provide a stable framework for the real economy to work. The FED under Bernanke is doing that. That is all they can do and that can not overcome bad tax, spending and regulatory policies that the FED has no influence on.
There was no liquidity problem. There was a problem of excessive debt. Attempting to solve a problem created by debt by issuing more debt will only result in disaster.
The Fed is explicitly enabling the irresponsible spending by congress by keeping interest rates artificially low via monetizing the debt. Incidentally he got up in front of Congress and flat out lied by saying he was doing no such thing. That is exactly what QE was. And it resulted in massive price increases in staples such as energy and food, the things we all need in order to survive. Inflation isn't coming... it's already here.
The Fed has debased the dollar massively over the last few years in order to pretend that the stock markets were going up. But in fact, there has been a direct correlation between the devaluation of the dollar, and the increases in the market indices.
But please, go ahead and continue to applaud the Fed for creating an asset stripping scheme that steals money from the middle class and concentrates it in the hands of bankers that have repeatedly broken the law, laws that the Fed has regulatory responsibility for.
...then why doesn't he publicly state that is the case and throw Obama under the bus?
Printing pieces of paper also transfers massive quantities of wealth from the hands of creditors and into the hands of debtors. It punishes those who were responsible, who amassed savings and created the driving engine for investors - capital. It rewards those who were irresponsible, who spent recklessly and amassed debts by consuming investment capital without return. Inflation is insidiously evil. And it is the tool this Administration will use to transfer wealth from those who have earned it to those who by their own work ethic will never ever have it otherwise.