After catching a few bits and pieces earlier today of Ben Bernanke's testimony on the subject of the Bank of America/Merrill Lynch deal before the House Oversight Committee, it seemed best to let the "professional" bloggers over at the Wall Street Journal do the heavy lifting and go for a nice afternoon hike instead - that turned out to be a good decision.
Here's recap of today's events, first, from the
Real Time Economics:
The Fed chairman is used to harsh treatment from some corners — Sen. Jim Bunning (R., Ky.) and Rep. Ron Paul (R., Texas) are two persistent Fed critics — but usually has a few friendly faces in front of him. That wasn’t the case during today’s hearings on Bank of America’s takeover of Merrill Lynch.
...
The onslaught was near universal, but the attacks came on different flanks. Republicans railed against what they perceived as a government imposing its will on business. Rep. Jim Jordan (R., Ohio) kept bringing up the October 2008 meeting where Treasury Secretary Henry Paulson, alongside Bernanke, presented bank CEOs with the TARP capital injections. “Do you see how a reasonable person could reach the conclusion that there, in fact, was this pattern of pressure from the government?”
Hmmm... That sounds kind of interesting.
Actually you can watch
the whole thing over at CSPAN, but, one glance down at the elapsed time/total time counter reveals that, at over three hours, it would be a substantial investment of time to find out what happened via that method.
Back to the folks at the WSJ,
this time when the subject of inflation was briefly discussed.
How will the Fed prevent its huge influx of money into the financial system from sparking an inflation outbreak? The question didn’t exactly open the door for new insight from Mr. Bernanke, but we’re sure he was pleased to reiterate to his view that everything would be just fine in the end.
“The money is electronic deposits from banks sitting in the Federal Reserve accounts — they’re not being used, not being loaned, they’re not circulating,” Mr. Bernanke explained to lawmakers who had all sorts of other gripes for three hours.
“They key issue here is, can we unwind this money creation and low interest rates in time to head off inflation when the economy begins to recover?” he said. “We have all the tools we need to do that. We believe we can do that.
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