Destroy the Economy, Win a Nobel Prize

Former Federal Reserve Chairman Ben Bernanke is a 2022 recipient of the Nobel Prize in economics for his writings on how government should respond to bank failures. Honoring Bernanke for his advice on what government should do when banks fail is like giving a fire safety award to an arsonist.

Bernanke was Fed chairman when the housing bubble, created by his predecessor Alan Greenspan in the wake of the bursting of Greenspan’s tech bubble and the 9-11 attacks, exploded. When the housing market collapsed, Bernanke worked with Congress and the Bush administration to bail out big banks and Wall Street firms.

In the years following the meltdown, the Bernanke-led Fed tried to “stimulate” the economy via massive money creation, near zero interest rates, and “quantitative easing,” where the Fed injects liquidity into the market via purchases of financial assets including Treasury bonds.

The Fed’s post-meltdown policies produced sluggish growth at best, while laying the groundwork for the next bust. A sign that the next crash was around the corner came in September of 2019, when the Federal Reserve began pumping billions of dollars a day into the “repurchasing” market, which banks use to make overnight loans to each other, in order to keep that market’s interest rates from rising above the Fed’s target rate. The covid lockdowns then gave the Fed an excuse to push interest rates to zero and massively expand quantitative easing.

The Fed’s actions are the prime culprit behind the price inflation plaguing America’s economy. The Fed has responded to the price inflation by increasing interest rates, although rates remain much lower than they would be in a free market. The fact that even these relatively small increases helped push the fragile economy into recession shows the instability of our debt-based economic system.

Bernanke, and Congress, should have responded to the meltdown by letting the recession that followed the meltdown run its course. This is the only way the economy can adjust to the market distortions caused when the Fed increases the money supply and lowers interest rates.

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