Professor Bernanke’s Bogus Contra-factual, Part 2: Why The Friedman/Bernanke Thesis About The Great Depression Was Dead Wrong
In explaining to the FT’s Martin Wolf why he bailed out the Wall Street gamblers at Goldman Sachs and Morgan Stanley while crushing millions of ordinary American savers and retirees, Bernanke typically repaired to his go to argument. It had nothing to do with the mild excesses of inventories and labor that had built up in the main street economy owing to the Greenspan housing and credit boom, as explained in Part 1.
That’s because Bernanke was not aiming to ameliorate the mild economic liquidation that ensued after the Lehman event; and which, as previously demonstrated, would have runs its course and self-corrected without any help from the Fed in any event.
No, Ben S. Bernanke will be someday remembered as the world’s most destructive battleship admiral. Not only was he fighting the last war, but his whole multi-trillion money printing campaign after September 15, 2008 was aimed at avoiding an historical Fed mistake that had never even happened!
As Bernanke explained it:
I should have done more (to mitigate anti-Fed sentiments). But I was very much engaged in trying to put out the fire. So I don’t know what to say. It was kind of predictable. The Federal Reserved failed in the 1930s. I think we did much better than in the 1930s.
The claim that the Fed resorted to “extraordinary policies” of ZIRP and QE because it was fighting a recurrence of Great Depression 2.0 is completely, profoundly, unequivocally and destructively wrong.
It is the giant fig leaf that obscures what really happened during and after the crisis. Namely, that the main street economy recovered on its own, and that the flood of money generated by Bernanke never left the canyons of Wall Street, thereby causing the destruction of honest price discovery in the financial markets once and for all.
So doing, the Fed and other central banks have turned financial markets into dangerous, unstable casinos. In the name of precluding the contra-factual——that is, Great Depression 2.0—-they have generated the mother of all financial bubbles.
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