Can we cut Greenspan's and Bernanke's entitlements? We need a total refund of the salary and other deferred gratuity (i.e. bribes) these crooks get paid from the same banker goons they bailed out with taxpayer funds. They get $350,000 for giving BS speeches and rewriting history on their role as the primary cause of The Great Recession (soon to be The Great Collapse). In any other profession, these guys would have been tarred, feathered and run out of town. Only in the bullsh&t world of banking do they get to f up the economy, rip off taxpayers/wage earners/savers/pensioners and still talk as if they are experts.

I disagree with your assessment, but to each their own. Greenspan and Bernanke are two of the most brilliant economic thinkers of our time. It now seems politically toxic to say so, but borrowers who entered into home financing agreements they didn't fully understand and couldn't afford were at least partly to blame for the crisis. Of course, no one wants to tell those about to lose their homes that they made a bad call. So be it. Those working at the Fed did what they could to keep a terrible recession from being even worse; and it could've been much worse if not for their expertise and hard work. In fact, Bernanke is an expert on the Great Depression and its causes. We couldn't have had a better person running the Fed during the recession and afterwards.

What are you smoking? Bernanke is brilliant? This the guy who was practically created The Great Recession which will ultimately turn out to be the greatest destruction of wealth in America of all times. The irony is Bernanke billed himself as an expert on how to avoid what he caused. What's worse is him and his band of Federal Reserve private bank cronies have, in their 8 years, entrenched a kind of corruption of not just capitalism but even the justice system. All kinds of massive financial fraud goes on by Goldman Sachs types yet not one of these thieves lands in prison. Despite a massive increase in debt (which no doubt indentures the nation even further to banking crooks) and a shitload of money printing to destroy savers, wage earners, pensioners and living standards of the vast majority - the only thing that has transpired is a massive transfer of wealth of the above to the banking "industry" (which is a scam not an industry producing anything of value). By now even a blind man can realize the disastrous effect Bernanke style crony capitalism and corruption has on the system. Everyone can realize this expect those who make their living within the banking "industry" that is.

Listen, friend. I'm not interested in making this personal. However, simply put, Bernanke didn't cause the Great Recession. Also, the world just wouldn't function without banks. I've never worked in the financial services industry, but I know something about it. For their services, successful lenders can earn significant profits in return for taking on often significant risks. Human nature being what it is, this makes banks a convenient punching bag when things go bad. It's easy. It's convenient. But that doesn't make it right. At least not always. Sometimes banks deserve it (I'm not very proud to say it these days, but I bank with Wells Fargo; and their creation of bogus accounts was terrible). However, more often than not (just a guess), they don't. Also, because of the crisis, banks are under more scrutiny now than before and operate under more constraints. This isn't indicative of an industry that enjoys special protection or benefits through its corruption of the federal government. As for the printing of money, I assume you're talking about quantitative easing (QE). That was done to inject liquidity into the financial system to keep it from seizing up. I'm not an expert, but I believe a lot of that printed money was used to buy risky assets. At least some of those assets can now be sold by the government at a profit (thanks in part to the Fed's intervention), which would offset the debt incurred to battle the crisis. By the way, considering the scale of the Fed's balance sheet, they're probably hesitant to do this all at once because of the possible contractionary effect it'd have on money supply and the general economy. I've heard Greenspan talk about this; and it makes sense.

I do believe you are trying to re-write history here. The great thing about the internet is that there are multiple records of Bernanke's role in causing The Great Recession including one gem of a video from Bernanke himself on KZfaq called "Ben Bernanke was wrong". It provides snippets from all his speeches leading right up to the 2008 blowup where he proclaims there is no bubble in real estate and no problems in the sub-prime derivative markets - right up to the point it blew up from under him! When it became obvious to everyone this was a disaster, he claimed it would have no impact on the economy (LOL!). Watch the clip for yourself and marvel at how this joker can be playing around with trillions of dollars and the lives of hundreds of millions. This gets to the larger issue. The whole idea of "wise man" like Bernanke sitting up in an ivory tower printing money (i.e counterfeiting) and setting interest rates (i.e. price fixing) is absurd. What part of this is capitalism? Its merely a cover for cronyism and corruption as the private bank entities who setup the Federal Reserve use this ill-begotten power to transfer their gambling losses onto the backs of suckers (i.e. taxpayers, wage earners, savers and pensioners) while privatizing profits. Its a scam and everyone with a brain in his head knows it. Yet this road show goes on. As for Bernanke, the only thing that he did after realizing what a disaster he caused was to hit the print button (wow didn't see that one coming), get cronies in govt to issue massive bailouts to the private bank cartel that is the Federal Reserve (ditto), and steal from savers/pensioners/wage earners by suppressing interest rates, producing fake inflation numbers and rigging the stock market to pay for it. The Federal Reserve or any bank for that matter does not create wealth, it merely transfers (more like steals) wealth from the productive economy. This isn't new by the way. This scam was well recognized by the founding fathers who were adamantly against the issuance of a monopoly to private banks over the creation of money. If you study history, which i bet you haven't, you'd know that central banking is just a cover for crony capitalism pretending to operate in the national interest when all it ends up being is a mechanism to transfer losses from private banks onto the backs of the productive economy. The great thing about 2008 is that it totally destroyed the credibility of all these slick talking shysters from Bernanke on downwards to academic economists - who now have the credibility of phone psychics. No longer is there any doubt that the Federal Reserve exists to profit private bank cronies at the expense of the productive economy (if need be) and that we are living under a kleptocratic system. Those who have tenaticles in the issuance of the currency and its value thereof through the illegal monopoly over the monetary system use their powers to defraud the productive economy - privatize profits and socialize losses.

+Nyasha Munodawafa Honestly I would rather look at this dude in lower resolution