Stupid Fed Trick

     The David Letterman Show use to have a segment called, "Stupid Pet Tricks." This was back in the day when Letterman actually had some relevance and talent. People would bring their pet on the show and have them perform some lame trick. I have recently been reminded of "Stupid Pet Tricks" watching Ben Bernanke's handling of monetary policy.
     It doesn't take a genius to figure out that with our monetary policy reflecting that of Europe, it won't be long before we are in the same dire straits as they are. In fact, our debt to GDP ratio is getting dangerously high, now solidly over seventy percent. Which means the government now owes almost an entire year's worth of the entire economic output of the country, and that does not not count the unfunded mandates of Social Security and Medicare. When these government promises are added to the balance sheet, our country's real debt is several times one year's economic output of the entire country.
      Ben Bernanke, the man who never worked a job in the real economy but now controls it through bad monetary policy, has been draining the life out of the economy at a rate of eighty five billion dollars a month. This is the amount he has been printing in his little meth lab for money and then using it to buy government bonds in order to keep their rates low so investors see equities as a better investment. This is what has been driving the market to new highs, it is not the traditional rising fundamentals of an expanding economy. And don't think that business leaders do not recognize this, and are holding onto their cash and not hiring as they would if the economy was actually expanding at a rate approaching that of an economy not on life support.
     It bears repeating that the average post-World War II gross domestic product growth rate has been 3.2 percent, in times of recovery after recessions, the growth rate is usually well over 4 percent. During the Reagan recovery of the 1980s, some financial quarters saw GDP grow at a rate of 7 percent. The average GDP growth rate during the Obama regime has pathetically been under 2 percent, enough to give any president GDP envy. Of course, when the economy is not growing there are no new jobs being created. But if you have drank the Obama administration's cool aid, you might be saying, "But wait, the last jobs report showed an addition of 240 thousand jobs." First of all, that number is padded with the 100 thousand people who became so despondent that they gave up looking for work and took themselves out of the job market. Barack Obama and his gang now count those people as employed. Secondly, even if 240 thousand legitimate jobs were added, that number is barely acceptable in a normal economy, let alone one that is suppose to be in recovery. During some months of the Reagan recovery, a million new jobs were added to the labor force.
     The government's own metric for real unemployment, the U-6 number, which is not the number that is front an center every month when the nation's unemployment rate is reported, is a whopping 15%. And with GDP growing at well under 2 percent, the record eighty million people that are not working in this country have no hope of finding work anytime soon. More people are now living in poverty than ever, 1 in 6, and there are more people receiving food stamps than at any other time, a staggering 50 million at last count. The unemployed are expected to suffer without work while our Vice President spends millions on lavish European vacations and the President and his family have already taken three taxpayer funded vacations, trying to exceed the 1.2 billion dollars it took to support their extravagant life style last year. But none of this matters, because Ben Bernanke can just print as much money as the President needs while at the same time ruining the greatest engine for economic growth the world has ever seen. Now that's a stupid Fed trick that rivals anything I ever saw on Letterman.