Protect the asset-owners... leave the wage-earners holding the bag....

Matthew Yglesias: All Hail Bernanke!:

Time giving Ben Bernanke its Person of the Year honors seems to me to say a lot about where we are as a society. Bernanke... follows basically conventional thinking and doesn’t make any unusual errors. Unfortunately, conventional thinking and normal errors lead into a major financial panic and the worst recession in 70 years. Then during the desperate fall of 2008 Bernanke takes decisive action and helps put a floor on the collapse. By spring 2009 it’s clear that this will be the worst recession since the end of the Great Depression.... At this point he basically unfurls a “Mission Accomplished” banner, says ten percent unemployment is okay by him, and if congress wants to do anything fiscally it should look at cutting Social Security benefits.... [That] demonstrates a very specific class skew—extraordinary intervention into the market place just long enough to fix the situation from the point of view of asset-owners while leaving wage-earners holding the bag. But the owners and managers and editors of Time Magazine and the companies that advertise in it probably don’t care so much about that. In a lot of respects it strikes me as the most fitting possible choice, an eloquent statement about where America is in 2009...

Posted via email from Jim Nichols