The Fed Is Destroying the World One Saver At A Time

I must confess to a deep-seated anger at just how insultingly stupid the world has become. As a sufferer of crisis fatigue I can be caught exclaiming You have got to be kidding me!!? several times per day, or perhaps shouting How dumb do they think we are?

Three choice outbursts came last week as I read Bernanke’s new blog and came across statements like this one:

I was concerned about those seniors as well. (…)Ultimately, the best way to improve the returns attainable by savers was to do what the Fed actually did: keep rates low (closer to the low equilibrium rate), so that the economy could recover and more quickly reach the point of producing healthier investment returns.

Translated, he’s saying that he was concerned about seniors, but he had to hurt them first in order to ‘save’ them.  And he had to hurt them bad, but he wants you to know, or his PR image repair specialist would like you to know, he was concerned.

The plan, as he tells it, was to punish the savers, bail out the big banks and the heavily-indebted (like the federal government) — but just for a while.mind you — in order to get the economy roaring again so savers could once more earn some sort of useful yield on their hard-earned savings.

But here we are 7 full years into that experiment and it’s not working. Maybe I could allow Bernanke’s  line of reasoning for six months. Twelve months at the outside.  But after you’ve gone and punished fixed income retirees, pension programs, and savers for seven long years (with no end in sight I might add!) you’ve slipped deep into untethered rationalization territory. 

A decent person would notice, hopefully sooner than later, that they are indeed hurting powerless people for the benefit of their own narrow needs and those of their few already powerful and rich friends. Which means: Bernanke is indecent.

I submit to you that Bernanke’s mealy-mouthed attempts at rehabilitating his image by claiming that he hurt retirees for their own benefit is about as disgusting and awful a display of rationalization you will find — today. Tomorrow, there will probably be something just as awful from some other public figure.