Article • Dean Baker’s Beat the Press
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This fact would be worth mentioning in an article that discusses Federal Reserve Board Chairman Ben Bernanke’s attitude toward the deficit. If Greenspan and Bernanke (who was a Fed governor from 2002) had paid attention to the $8 trillion housing bubble, and prevented it from growing to the point where it could do so much damage, then the country would not be in a serious downturn today, and we would not be running a large budget deficit.
It is only due to the incompetence of the people running the Fed that we are facing such severe economic problems. In other lines of work, like dishwashers and custodians, people would be fired for such incompetence, but those running the Fed are not held accountable in the same way as most workers.