Ben Bernanke

by L. Randall Wray We are in the third act of the theater of the absurd. In the first act, Chairman Bernanke created QE1, through which the Fed bought $1.75 trillion of assets from banks—mostly trashy mortgage backed securities, but also a…

The problem Bernanke is having goes to terminology and the difficulty of explaining a complex monetary system. In 2002 and again last year, Bernanke used 'money' to denote the reserves he is now creating to buy government Treasury…

Yes, I know; there are flaws in this video but still... C'mon, is Bernanke printing money or not? In 2002, he said yes. In 2009, he said yes. Now he says no? My take: it's a lot easier to tell a story if you stick to it. And it's also nice…

For months, Ben Bernanke has been more or less pleading with fiscal policymakers to catch up to him. With yesterday’s announced agreement on tax cuts and the extension of unemployment benefits, Congress and the Administration are making the…

Like gold, U.S. dollars have value only to the extent that they are strictly limited in supply. But the U.S. government has a technology, called a printing press (or, today, its electronic equivalent), that allows it to produce as many…

Frederick Sheehan is the author of Panderer to Power: The Untold Story of How Alan Greenspan Enriched Wall Street and Left a Legacy of Recession (McGraw-Hill, 2009) and "The Coming Collapse of the Municipal Bond…

This is a hilarious cartoon video about the Fed and its program of quantitative easing, explaining it in terms everyone can understand. Watch for humourous references to "The Quantitative Easing," "The Inflation," "The Deflation," and…

This is a cross-post from New Deal 2.0. On the eve of President Obama’s arrival to the G20 talks in South Korea, a growing chorus of voices is questioning the direction of U.S. monetary policy. Germany’s finance minister, Wolfgang…

Frederick Sheehan is the author of Panderer to Power: The Untold Story of How Alan Greenspan Enriched Wall Street and Left a Legacy of Recession (McGraw-Hill, 2009). "igher stock prices will boost consumer wealth and help increase…

James Galbraith was on Yahoo! Tech Ticker talking about Fed policy. The quote he made that caught my eye was this one in response to whether the Fed Chairman Bernanke believes what he says and writes: "Well, one thing you can…