12/04/09 Stockholm, Sweden – In yesterday’s confirmation hearing for his second four-year term as Federal Reserve chairman, Ben Bernanke received a thorough tongue-lashing from Senator Jim Bunning (R-KY). Here are a few highlights from the transcript as well as the video…
* “…you put the printing presses into overdrive to fund the government’s spending and hand out cheap money to your masters on Wall Street, which they use to rake in record profits while ordinary Americans and small businesses can’t even get loans for their everyday needs.”
* “…you have decided that just about every large bank, investment bank, insurance company, and even some industrial companies are too big to fail. Rather than making management, shareholders, and debt holders feel the consequences of their risk-taking, you bailed them out. In short, you are the definition of moral hazard.”
* “Because you bowed to pressure from the banks and refused to resolve them or force them to clean up their balance sheets and clean out the management, you have created zombie banks that are only enriching their traders and executives. You are repeating the mistakes of Japan in the 1990s on a much larger scale, while sowing the seeds for the next bubble.”
* “From monetary policy to regulation, consumer protection, transparency, and independence, your time as Fed Chairman has been a failure.”
Footage of the Senate Banking Committee hearing is below.
Rocky Vega
Rocky Vega is publisher of Agora Financial International, where he advances the growth of Agora Financial publishing enterprises outside of the US. Previously, he was publisher of The Daily Reckoning, and founding publisher of both UrbanTurf and RFID Update -- which he ran from Brazil, Chile, and Puerto Rico -- as well as associate publisher of FierceFinance. Rocky has an honors MS from the Stockholm School of Economics and an honors BA from Harvard University, where he served on the board of directors for Let’s Go Publications, Harvard Student Agencies, and The Harvard Advocate.
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go jim go!!!
i about fell out of my chair reading those quotes….he has been reading my emails to some other senator….
Alan Greenspan set interest rate to zero and pumped about $3 trillion of credit into the economy to bubble up housing and consumer debt.
When the Greenspan puff got popped, Ben Bernanke set interest rate to zero and pumped about $3 trillion of liquidity to the banks to bubble up their balance sheets.
The net result is some $6 trillion of extra national debt. Over a period of less than a decade. This extra debt cannot possibly be paid by anybody in the country over 10 years old. They will be paid by the less than 10 year old, or yet unborn. But that too is impossible. This inter-generational debt will crush the country. There is no escape.
Are these two people the definition of moral hazard? More. They are the definition of systemic treason.
How much money has Bunning accepted from the banks that Bernanke saved? The Entire congress is in the pocket of Wallstreet and he wants to chastise the FED? Look I am no fan of Bernanke, but you can’t overlook what the senate did in the 1990 to allow for derivates trading