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Ben Bernanke: On The Way From Hero To Zero?
Submitted by Pater Tenebrarum via Acting-Man.com,
Bernanke Keeps Cashing In – PIMCO Finds Some Use for the Ex-Fed Chairman too
We recently wrote about Ben Bernanke’s deft moves to make some coin from his former position as the US chief central economic planner by getting a job as a consultant for highly leveraged hedge fund Citadel (see “The Courage to Cash In” for details). As we have pointed out on this occasion, it is a virtual certainty that contrary to the press releases on the matter, Citadel didn’t hire Bernanke for his revolutionary economic insights or his forecasting prowess. If that were indeed the reason for employing him, Citadel might as well shoot itself in the head.

Two years ago the Atlantic celebrated Bernanke as the “hero who saved the global economy” by the expedient of printing truckloads of money and suppressing interest rates to zero. Today the WSJ is telling him to “stop blaming others for his mistakes”.
The reason why large financial companies are prepared to pay big bucks for the advice of formerly high-ranking monetary bureaucrats are the latter’s contacts to and insights into the bureaucratic apparatus and its workings. This revolving door syndrome it is a well-known feature of modern-day corporatism and as such certainly worth criticizing. As we have pointed out, we are not begrudging Bernanke that he is finally getting a real job outside of the ivory tower and the bureaucracy. It is however clear that the only “expertise” his new employers want to tap is directly connected to his former role as an interventionist. In short, his free market value is a subsidiary function of the government’s interventionist policies.
However, it is difficult to fault the companies hiring him for trying to gain a small advantage in this manner. To some extent this applies actually to a great many instances of revolving door cronyism and corporate lobbying. Given the fact that government does intervene in the economy and thus represents a grave threat to the private sector at all times, companies are not merely trying to purchase political influence in order to gain privileges and competitive advantages. Often they are simply trying to take out insurance against becoming a target or victim of government intervention, and in most cases this is certainly at least an additional motivation. The lines between purchasing undue influence and trying to protect one’s very existence are definitely blurry.
Last week PIMCO also hired Bernanke as a “consultant”. The company has already hired his predecessor Alan Greenspan previously. Once again, the press releases and statements accompanying this event are hilarious, although PIMCO at least admits in an off-hand remark that hiring the man may actually have something to do with his former job:
“Former Federal Reserve Chairman Ben S. Bernanke is joining Pacific Investment Management Co. as a senior adviser, his second consulting agreement with a top money manager in as many weeks.
Bernanke will contribute his economic expertise to the firm’s investment process, the Newport Beach, California-based firm said Wednesday. Bernanke previously spoke at Pimco’s client conference in March and advised on the last two of its quarterly economic forums that guide investment strategy.
“We think our clients expect this of us — we’ve had a long history of attracting top-notch talent and contributors,” Group Chief Investment Officer Daniel Ivascyn said in a telephone interview. “Obviously his experience within central banking is important at the moment, given where we may be in terms of the U.S. economic cycle, but we’re looking for and excited about his ability to make broad-based contributions to our strategy.”
At Pimco, which suffered record redemptions following the departure last year of co-founder Bill Gross, Bernanke will also engage with clients. The 61-year-old, who led the U.S. central bank during the deepest economic downturn since the Great Depression, earlier this month joined Citadel, the hedge fund run by Chicago billionaire Kenneth Griffin, to advise on monetary policy, financial markets and the global economy.
Bernanke is working with only these two firms, according to DJ Nordquist, a communications director at the Brookings Institution in Washington, where the former chairman is a distinguished fellow in residence. Bernanke remains a full-time employee at Brookings, she said.
(emphasis added)
All these comments about wanting to obtain access to Bernanke’s “economic expertise” are lough-out-loud funny in our opinion. As noted above, Citadel and PIMCO might as well commit seppuku if that’s what they hired him for. We also wonder how someone can possibly hold three theoretically demanding jobs at once and hope to perform well in all of them. Last time we looked, the day still had only 24 hours.

?? (Seppuku) – or what could happen if someone really hired Bernanke for his “economic expertise”.
Image by: ARTforSOLES
Bernanke’s Constant Stream of Fed Apologias Under Attack
It seems Bernanke’s blogging efforts are not as widely appreciated as he perhaps hoped. For a while he and arch-Keynesian Larry Summers bored readers to tears with their back-and-forth about the latter’s revival of the “secular stagnation” theory. We may soon write about this debate in more detail, in the meantime we only want to point out that it is deeply ironic that two men who have been instrumental in ruining the structural integrity of the economy with the policies they have advocated and implemented are now arguing over just how desolate an economic wasteland they have left behind.
Intermittently Bernanke continues to pen the occasional Fed apologia, in the process absolving himself of any responsibility for the state of the economy. Surprisingly, the Wall Street Journal has recently taken aim at this habit (a write-up by Zerohedge can be seen here). Although the WSJ stops short of admitting to the utter futility of central planning by monetary authorities, the article does contain a few unusually candid remarks. This is unusual because the modern-day central economic planning architecture is rarely questioned at all in the mainstream media. A few pertinent quotes:
“Mr. Bernanke’s theory of post-crisis monetary policy is that if it’s working, then do more of it. And if it’s not working, then do more of it too.
[…]
[But] perhaps Ben should consult Stanley Fischer, the Fed’s current vice chairman, who recently said on CNBC that “we are going to be changing monetary policy from the most extremely expansionary we’ve been able to do in all of history to an extremely expansionary monetary policy.” That doesn’t sound like a return to tight money. Lifting rates off zero means beginning an inevitable return to monetary normalcy that lets markets set rates and allocate capital.
We can understand that Mr. Bernanke doesn’t like being tagged with any responsibility for poor economic results. He absolved himself for any mistakes before the financial crisis too. But sooner or later he and the Fed have to stop using the financial crisis as the all-purpose excuse for slow growth.
(emphasis added)
As you can see, the author of the WSJ opinion piece is incongruously still hoping for a world in which “markets set rates and allocate capital”. He provides no elaboration on how such a world is supposed to come about in a central bank-directed fiat money system. Still, the fact that the author indicates that Bernanke and the Fed at least share some responsibility for the economy’s poor performance is a surprising development as such already. It is perhaps a subtle sign of a change in social mood for the worse. One of yesterday’s “heroes” is suddenly in danger of being pushed off his pedestals.
Conclusion
We offer the above as tentative evidence that yet another hero of the recent cyclical bull market, resp. echo bubble, may be in danger of falling from grace. This has already happened to his predecessor Alan Greenspan, who has been gradually demoted from “Maestro” to “irresponsible bubble blower”. The reputation of another icon of the bull market era, Warren Buffett, is in peril as well in light of the well-documented fact that he furiously lobbied for tax-payer bailouts of companies he was a large investor in.
This is mainly interesting from a sociological perspective, and with that it is indirectly of relevance to financial markets as well. It actually indicates that the bubble may be on increasingly thin ice. As long as a bull market’s persistence is not coming into doubt, public figures who are closely associated with the trend tend to be widely revered. Once the trend changes or is close to changing, the public’s mood will turn sour and these formerly esteemed figures will suddenly find themselves increasingly under attack. In this sense the somewhat less praise-laden verdicts that are lately emerging with respect to Ben Bernanke could be seen as an early warning sign.
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Hero? When?
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=INmqvibv4UU
they think that I've got no respect
but Ben-ja-min is less than zero.
Hey, ooh hey, hey, ooh hey.
TIME Magazine "Pedro of the Year 2009"
Followed by Zuckerberg, The Protestor, Obama, Pope Francis, Ebola Fighters
It appears we've reached PEAK PEDRO
He saved the banks, he saved the stock market and he saved the government from having to pay any interest on the money it borrows to finance it's profligate welfare/warfare spending. Government spending, which, I should point out, is the ONLY source of "growth" in the entire economy since the Great Recession.
Sounds to me more like the people who benefitted from all this are the ones starting to bitch now, which I find laughably hypocritical. (Hate it that much? OK, give the money back.)
The rest of us have known this was a bad idea from the get-go.
So I suppose that means that he 'SAVED' a bunch of Obama tee times as well.
that's quite a cover for atlantic: the taker of chicago, rahm emanuel; the hero, ben bernanke; the greatest living novelist, philip roth.
Liesman interviewing Bernanke. The Ass Fucked Clown Show. Thanks for the link.
ha,ha
well done!!!
Outstanding work!
Who was the Bernak ever a 'hero' to except sychophant Fed fanboy douchebags??
Ben was jusr being a good obidient boy
so what! this is all contrived BS....its easy to sacpegoat these guys after they have signd on for billions in fees, plus the damage is done...as planned!
He shame family, he know what he must do.
FUCK YOU Bernanke
"Bernanke saved the global economy" . . . for whom? Like we don't know.
More fluff, Ben's in the Tribe and there is no way he is going down. We now own everything including the media, so don't get your goyim wet dreams going just yet, Ben will be on top for a long, long time, just like Israel.
What makes you think the tribe won't go down with him?
The irony is that graft and cronyism is so obviously rampant in the US finance sector, that Bernanke doesn't even need to leverage his connections. People will assume that he gets inside information even if he doesn't. My guess is that it's mostly about marketing, and that Citadel and Pimco don't expect much more than that.
At what point can we just stop with the charade that they are mistakes or poor policy? it is intentional. Legal tender laws require we accept worthless currency. Those laws violate the 5th amendment. Legal tender was jammed down our throats under a court packing scheme nobody has ever heard of. None of it is accident or mistake.
So when the court strikes down the legal tender law, what do those who really run things do? Well they ALREADY knew that the decision was coming. Something this important never “just happens”. They were ready for it. They knew they wouldn’t have the votes so they had gotten a law passed right before it came down to BUMP UP the number of justices BACK up to 9. .... And thus just ONE YEAR after the decision STRIKING DOWN the legal tender scam they REVERSED the decision. Knox v. Lee, 79 U.S. 457 (1871). http://www.thetruthaboutthelaw.com/they-make-you-use-money-that-is-backe...
Good thing for the POMO desk that they got silver down a little off the highs. Having it close up 3% would be a very bullish sign.
So why does everybody hate him? Funny stuff.
Bernanke doesn't just make the cover. He has his own magazine!
https://imagizer.imageshack.us/v2/411x549q90/714/lunatic2.jpg
This has already happened to his predecessor Alan Greenspan, who has been gradually demoted from “Maestro” to “irresponsible bubble blower”.
These guys have to LIE - they are executing orders for objectives contrary to the public interest that is why there cannot be any truth - EVER - and why they look like idiots
"When it becomes serious, you have to lie."
http://www.zerohedge.com/article/head-eurogroup-admits-lying-about-secre...
But they seem to have no problem lying as long as they get paid.
The lack of integrity by the people in control of our country is truly frightening.
The uranium deal with Russia by Hillary while Sec. of State is absolutely unbelievable.
If she gets elected, we deserve everything coming to us.
Of course, the Ratpublicans will field nothing but a banker-backed war monger.
We are so screwed it is not even funny. Sometimes I wished I lived in complete ignorance like the 80% of Americans do.
This reminds me of General Douglas Haig, Britain's lead commander in WWI, architect of ceaseless human wave attacks against entrenched defensive positions that lead to the wholesale slaughter of his soldiers.
It took a couple of years, two or three, but all of England realized what a disaster he was and how his incompetence and arrogance destroyed the future of the nation.
Hello Ben...
But Churchill escaped consequences for Gallipoli -- but hey, those were colonials anyway.
HA ha!
I have that copy of the Atlantic framed in my office hanging on the wall by my desk.
I hope to sell it for 1,000,000,000,000,000 USD one day
You will likely need that 1,000,000,000,000,000 to buy a handful of household items in our not-too-distant hyperinflationary future...
ALL CENTRAL BANKERS SHOULD BE PUNISHED BY SPENDING THE REST OF THEIR NATTURAL LIVES IN PAIN AMPLIFIERS.
>This has already happened to his predecessor Alan Greenspan, who has been gradually demoted from “Maestro” to “irresponsible bubble blower”.
Greenspan demoted to "senile babbling baboon" from about 1991 onwards.
Bernanke-poo did what he did, and he can't undo it now, no matter how many puerile blogs he posts. I doubt there will ever be a completely clear, objective measure of what he did, but especially if he now does nothing but stonewall, lie, and blather about himself.
If he published an HONEST book of what they talked about in 2008 - and today - it would be terrific. It might all be wrong, but it would be a terrific read, and useful to current policy makers one way or another.
I wouldn't trust Bernanke to park my car. Fuck that guy. What an asshole. The amazing part is the number of idiots who believe the shit that pours out of his mouth - or ass - wherever he gets his ideas.
"Hero" on the guillotine
Liberty is a demand. Tyranny is submission.
Give me a chance to be a hero. As FED chairman I would print 50 trillion and send it out to every American alive. Just think $150,000 for every single person in the USA. I'm sure that would get them spending, helping Americans keep their jobs. A real bouns for China too.
Again, someone is pretending Bernanke didn't know what he was doing, and we ended up with economic crisis "by mistake". He know exactly what he was doing, it's just hard for an average american to grasp a concept of being a slave, when you've been indoctrinated that you are "the land of the free" by your schools and hollywood for generations.
He didn't save shit!! The FED has printed Trillions just to back stop the banks and then have them pump the money into the markets making it look like a recovery. FUCK him I'm the Hero taking care of my kids and so many Mothers and Fathers out there.
Ben's strategy was very complicated. Print $$ to hand out to banks and thereby hedge funds. Resign from office and go collect some for himself. At 3 different locations.
Brilliant !
Bernanke, Paulson, and Geithner, had only one way to proceed if they wanted to buy time. Today, the time is up, and all three know it all too well. Had Bernanke opted to let the banks fail in 2008 there would have been no time to plan their BUGOUT, and they would have found themselves hanging from lamp posts, or tree limbs, along with the rest of the tribe SS Jackboot THUG monetary heroin brownshirts. As it stands today, the tribe is now situated to genocide the masses that would have hung them from lamp posts, and tree limbs, back in the day. The tribe always plans their moves, and they are not impulsive. The masses don't plan anything, and are only impulsive.
It may be wishful thinking but at some point in the not too distant future I hope they teach our children in school that Greenspan and Bernanke were traitors to the U.S. people no different than Benedict Arnold.
Of course that would also mean a total repudiation of Keynesian economics.
"Ben Bernanke: On The Way From Hero To Zero?"
A resounding YES.
Quid pro quo Clarice. Quid pro quo.
Bribing government official, even after the fact, should be illegal.
What? It is? Never mind.
Vanilla Ice: Drop the zero and get with the hero.
It's the Syndrome, stupid=> http://wp.me/p4OZ4v-1CZ
We are so far from closing the case on the failure Bernanke was and is. We've only been riding the cocaine high portion of the temporary boost that we can't even imagine the pain and massive hangover on the other side. Give it decade before you even begin to draw any conclusion. The economy is on novocaine right now. Give it time to wear off and we'll feel the pain and massive economic scar left behind by the current Fed policies. Remember this genius was conviced subprime was completely contained and posed absolutely no threat to our economy. Automatic disqualifier for any future economic policy credibility. I'm not of the pursuation that the Fed is capable enough to plan and engineer an economic crash. I think it's just a consequence of their flawed logic combined with a healthy dose of desperation attempting to counter the economic damage they create.