Aside from the Bernank's imbecilic repsonse re: the price of gold, note the response when Rep. Ryan turns the questioning to the issue of jobs ie: whether or not conditions were ripe for the private sector to take the baton from the public sector (about 4:30 minutes in).
The first thing to note is the eye roll from Bernanke to Ryan's question. The second is the response, which he clearly gets wrong.
Bernanke should have been fired before this time, not rehired. If responses like this are not good enough, his dismal forecasting and problem-solving skills (which mysteriously seem to make existing problems worse) should do the trick.
Hopefully, the next President make firing this ass-clown his top priority. If he doesn't resign, have him arrested and thrown in jail.
"I don’t fully understand the movements in the gold price" and "I guess I don't buy your premise" are going to go down in economic history as two of the dumbest phrases ever uttered by a Federal Reserve chairman and this guy has them both.
I'll grant you that one was uttered before he was the chairman, however at the time he was knees and elbows deep in the crisis, along with Greenspan, but that just makes his ascension to Chairmanship that much more remarkable.
What do you have to do to lose your job in DC anyway?
Paul Ryan’s Question - June 11, 2010 - The New York Sun:
Chairman Bernanke’s testimony before the House Budget Committe this week has set the Web buzzing over the fact that he is, as the Wall Street Journal’s Jon Hilsenrath put it, “puzzled” by the surging gold price. When one gets a Fed chairman averring that he doesn't “fully understand the movements in the gold price,” it’s certainly news. But the story from the hearing that caught our ear was the emergence of the congressman who asked the headline question, Paul Ryan of Wisconsin, as a point man on what we see as the issue of the hour — fiat money.
This came 31 minutes into C-Span’s video of the hearing, when Mr. Ryan noted that on Tuesday “gold hit an all-time high,” or, as we like to put it, the value of the dollar fell to an all-time low. Mr. Ryan suggested that most people would view the development “as a vote of no confidence against fiat currencies.” What he asked the chairman was “what does that price signal tell you and what is your view of the long-term repercussions with respect to weak currency policies?” He said he supposed one could argue that we don’t have a weak dollar because everyone else is weaker, but asked about the implications for a the “strength and stability of our currency.”
“Well,” Mr. Bernanke replied, “the signal that gold is sending is in some ways very different from what other asset prices are sending. For example, the spread between nominal and inflation index bonds remains quite low, suggesting just 2% inflation over the next 10 years. Other commodity prices have fallen recently quite severely including oil prices and food prices. So gold is out there doing something different from the rest of the commodity group. I don’t fully understand the movements in the gold price, but I do think there’s a great deal of uncertainty and anxiety in financial markets right now and some people believe that holding gold will be a hedge against the fact that they view many other investments as being risky and hard to predict at this point.”
The chairman’s answer strikes us as a classic. One doesn’t go into gold because, as the be-puzzled Mr. Bernanke seems to suggest, one lacks confidence in, say, “other investments,” soybeans, say, or iron ore. One goes into gold because one lacks confidence in the fiat currencies.
This dovetails right to my feeling about the "boy-wonders" of the administrations economic team.
The jobs reports came out today and the administration hacks predictably went on the offensive. One was just on Bloomberg (Gene Sperling, I think. HARD TO KEEP TRACK OF THE RATS LEAVING THIS SINKING SHIP), defending the administrations "focus" or lack thereof on jobs. The questioner asked if the administration in hindsight made a mistake focusing on Health Care to the exclusion of jobs and the economy.
The response was predictable. Once again along the lines of We inherited this and that...we didn't realized the severity of the recession we inherited....blah, blah, blah.
HOLD ON, CHIEF!! How long have you ass-clowns been in office? At what point DID it occur to you that the economy sucked? Isn't that YOUR JOB, to recognize things as they ARE? Seems like some are still in DENIAL. I'm glad I don't have a microphone.
Mind you, the Ryan - Bernanke questioning took place in June 2010. So thankfully some were focused on jobs. Unfortunately, they were drowned out by those forces -- the Obama - Bernanke - Keynesian clowns -- who were in denial that THEIR solutions were failing to work.
They just continue to engage in finger-pointing and blame shifting. Ass-clowns of a feather seem to want to flock together in DC I guess, cause Bernanke (allegedly) is a Republican.
Remember the "Summer of Recovery'?
http://www.whitehouse.gov/the-press-office/vice-president-biden-delivers-report-president-summer-recovery-act-activity
Apparently, it was going on around the same time this questioning was occurring. Some of us obstructionist, idiots were a bit skeptical. History will tell decide who was right and who was wrong. But then again, at that point, some in DC will try to re-write history. SNAFU.
We deserve better from the Whiny, Finger-Pointing, Cry-baby in Chief and his minions.
UPDATE: for clarity, when I use the term ass-clown, I am using it in the context listed under Section 2, Article 1 of the Urban Dictionary. However, many of the other definitions fit the bill as well.
http://www.urbandictionary.com/define.php?term=ass%20clown
1. One whose stupidity and/or ineptitude exceeds the descriptive potential of both the terms ass and clown in isolation, and in so doing demands to be referred to as the conjugate of the two.
It seems as if -- given time and the right economic and monetary conditions -- the terms "Bernank" and "ass-clown" may become synonymous.
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