Ron Paul: QE2 Is a Total Failure and Ben Bernanke Is Delusional About Inflation

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“When a country embarks on deficit financing (Obamanomics) and inflationism (Quantitative easing) you wipe out the middle class and wealth is transferred from the middle class and the poor to the rich.”
– Ron Paul

Mission almost accomplished!


Ben Bernanke faced some tough questions at the House Budget Committee hearing Wednesday. Still, the Fed chairman is probably glad he wasn’t before the House Domestic Monetary Policy and Technology Subcommittee, which is chaired by Rep. Ron Paul (R-Tx.)

Rep. Paul joined Dan Gross and me Wednesday afternoon to discuss Bernanke’s testimony and his subcommittee’s hearing. As you might expect, the longtime Fed critic took umbrage with Bernanke’s testimony, most notably the chairman’s claims that QE2 is working and that inflation isn’t brewing. (See: Under Pressure: Bernanke-Ryan Square Off as Ron Paul Waits in the Wings.)

QE2 is a “total failure,” except for those folks who work on Wall Street,” Rep. Paul says. “It hasn’t done anything for Main Street; hasn’t done anything to give us real jobs; hasn’t done anything for people who are losing their houses.”

As for inflation, “I think there’s plenty,” Rep. Paul says, citing “skyrocketing” commodity prices and rising food prices. One problem is the Fed’s reliance on core CPI, which famously excludes food and energy and relies on hedonic adjustments. “They rig that number,” he says. “[Bernanke] looks at government stats that are fudged to reassure him he doesn’t have to do anything.”

With the Republicans controlling the House and Rep. Paul’s views now more mainstream, the Texas Congressman has somewhat toned down his public criticisms of the Fed lately. Still, he hasn’t changed a fundamental view that central economic policymaking via the Fed is doomed to fail.

“We’re trying to correct the massive problems we had this decade with more” of the same policies, he laments. “He’s supposed to give us full employment and stable prices and we have neither. How did the Fed do?”

Rep. Paul says he’d support stripping the Fed of its dual mandate – full employment and price stability – as others in Congress have discussed. But he doesn’t think it will do much good and continue to push for a full audit of the Fed and some “competition” for the dollar, as you’ll see in part 2 of this interview.

Posted Feb 10, 2011 08:51am EST by Aaron Task in Newsmakers, Politics

Source: Yahoo Finance

“In the absence of the gold standard, there is no way to protect savings from confiscation through inflation. … This is the shabby secret of the welfare statists’ tirades against gold. Deficit spending is simply a scheme for the confiscation of wealth. Gold stands in the way of this insidious process. It stands as a protector of property rights. If one grasps this, one has no difficulty in understanding the statists’ antagonism toward the gold standard.”
– Alan Greenspan

“By a continuing process of inflation ( = quantitative easing = printing money), governments can confiscate, secretly and unobserved, an important part of the wealth of their citizens. There is no subtler, no surer means of overturning the existing basis of society than to debauch the currency. The process engages all the hidden forces of economic law on the side of destruction, and does it in a manner which not one man in a million is able to diagnose.”
– John Maynard Keynes

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