My, my, my. Everybody seems to be just full of questions for Federal Reserve Chairman Ben Bernanke. The questions I linked to yesterday were just the tip of the iceberg.
5) Do you think Fed policy could be having a perverse impact on the economy as the dollar weakens, food and energy prices increase, causing real wages and consumption to fall leading to weaker economic growth and deflation in other goods and services?
and
10) What do you think would have happened if the Fed had not taken the extraordinary steps it did during the financial crisis?
Dylan Ratigan is “crowdsourcing” questions. Yves Smith follows suit. There are scads of questions, mostly loaded and politically based, in the comments.
5) How are you regulating banks differently now than you were in 2005?
and
10) Are you concerned that the Fed’s balance sheet is a record 16-17% of US GDP? If you begin to shrink your balance sheet, what will the effect be on the banks, lending and the general economy?
As I noted yesterday that’s a lot of attention being lavished on a guy who holds a job that our grandparents probably had never heard of. Yet more evidence that the financial sector has grown beyond any reason, counter-productively, and that the Federal Reserve should have some of the responsibilities that have accreted onto it over the years trimmed back.
