Monday, October 14, 2013

Yellen in the Night

Oh dear.  Our new rule-of-the-experts nominee for Chairman of the Federal Reserve Board admits she didn't have a clue about the Crash of 2008.  Here's the quote from Janet Yellen:
“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.”
Now I think that it is reasonable to suppose that the average ruling-class bear couldn't have known that we had a once-in-a-generation financial crisis in 2008.

But the folks in charge of the nation's money supply should have known that cheap credit in the aftermath of the tech crash of 2000 and that huge subsidies for home mortgages and government policy to shovel mortgages to people that couldn't make the payments was going to end in tears.

The problem is that for the Keynesian liberals a little bit of cheap credit is worth it.  It's worth it to give the economy a bit of stimulus.  It's worth it to help create jobs.  And all the other self-indulgent stuff that the ruling class spews out.

But for you and I all this mucking around with the credit system is poison, for us and for our lives.  Right now it means that ordinary people can't get a decent rate of interest on their savings.  At other times it means inflation raising the price of groceries.  And inflation eating away at the value of your savings.

And all because the cheap credit philosophy of the Keynesians means that they are always trying to get out of a jam.

Now we have Janet Yellen, the president's nominee to run the nation's monetary policy.  And she admits that she didn't really have a clue about what was going on in the 2000s in the run-up to the Crash of 2008.

So what does it mean three years down the road when the current quantitative easing results in a nasty inflation?  What mumbo-jumbo will she be muttering when things start to go wrong?

Actually, we know what the liberals will be saying then.  They will be blaming the banks and they will be proposing credit controls to stop the reckless speculation that is the inevitable consequence of their foolish policy.

It will be a case of Yellen in the dark.

1 comment:

  1. Actually the way that this system works is the speculators on Wall Street get to inflate huge bubbles that sucker in the middle class to invest and then leave the market as the bubble grows to unsustainable size. But the dot-com bubble, like the housing bubble provide lots of campaign contributions to the ruling class at taxpayer expense. I had thought Yellin was just another insider who understood the game but it appears she is just clueless, which is even scarier than her being a crook.

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