Ben Bernanke Saved the Day?

By William L. Anderson

 

The final verdict is in. The venerable “progressive” Atlantic has spoken. Ben Bernanke and his “radical interventions,” the publication recently claimed, “may have saved the day.”

 

Yet it is Bernanke and his “progressive” supporters who are “financially illiterate.” Literally everything included in that worshipful portrayal is nothing more than the implementation of inflation. The only thing that Bernanke has done is to print money or engage in its equivalent.

Take his “bold” step of “relaxing collateral requirements,” for example. Why is the system in crisis in the first place? It is because the government “encouraged” lenders to relax their own lending requirements, and when the inevitable defaults became systematic, the entire U.S. financial system went into crisis.

In other words, the Atlantic heaps praise on Bernanke for doing the very things that created the financial crisis in the first place. If that is “brave thinking,” then anyone suffering from a hangover who imbibes in the “hair of the dog solution” is a “brave thinker.”

Bernanke did not “save” AIG, GM, and Fannie and Freddie. He nationalized them, turning them into nothing more than dependents of the financial welfare state.

http://www.thefreemanonline.org/columns/not-so-fast/ben-bernanke-saved-the-day/