Ben Bernanke’s Blog

I think it was Yogi Berra who said "There are lies, damned lies, and statistics." Or maybe Casey Stengel.

Anyway, the point is that most people who throw a lot of statistics around are liars. Like people who say that the dollar was down 5.7% against the Euro Monday. I mean, you can tell that's a lie by all the statistics in it -- 5.7%, Monday, dollar, etc.

I personally don't see what everybody is so worried about. In the dining room at the Federal Reserve, we have gold-plated plates. Think about that. If anything ever went wrong with the dollar, you could bring your paper money to the Federal Reserve and we'd give you a voucher good for lunch at the Federal Reserve cafeteria, fountain drink not included.

Please, people--I've done all I can. Every morning when you pick up your Wall Street Journal you see "The Fed lowered its key rate by a quarter point." Sort of like "NFL Lineman Shot Outside After-Hours Club".  Same story, different day.

Folks, I can't go any lower. When you think of the great Fed Chairmen of the past such as Alan Greenspan, William McChesney Martin, Eugene "Big Daddy" Lipscomb--no wait, he was an NFL lineman--you're not supposed to think of some late-night cable TV ad. 

I'm the chairman of the Federal Reserve Bank, not a used car salesman!  I want my mother to be proud of me when the other women sitting around the pool start in with "My son the oncologist" or "My son the employee benefits lawyer."  I don't want them to seque into "I saw Bernie on TV last night. What was he selling? Dinette sets?"

I get a lot of emails in my Federal Reserve inbox from ordinary people like you saying "I am about to lose my house.  Do something!" 

Why is that my fault?  Did I tell you to listen to the mortgage broker when he said to pick a number between one and a million and he would write it down as your annual income?

If you go to the Federal Reserve website you will see that our job is to "conduct the nation's monetary policy" and  "provide left-handed pinch-hitting power off the bench."  I made up that last one to see if you were paying attention. That's the problem -- what we do is so boring nobody gives a flying fuck at a rolling donut until there's an auctioneer on their front lawn.

That's why we use a Ouija board at the Fed.

After I agreed to speak at Harvard Class Day, a student named Christian Lamb penned an article in The Harvard Crimson suggesting 15 ways I could appear cool. The article is surprisingly pretty funny, though I'd imagine this blog already makes me cool enough already.

Still, I'm advising that the Harvard Crimson not just cease and desist mocking me, but cease and desist in general. When I was at Harvard, I didn't piss around writing articles about quirky bald professors. I was busy with only two matters: Figuring out why past depressions occurred and preventing the next one by contributing to the economy through methods such as waiting tables. I even reported all of my tips in my tax filings.

The Fed Chairmanship is a lonely role. Sometimes I feel like I'm the only one being terrorized by a man so obsessed with his own legacy that he's willing to distort the truth and ruin the lives of others for personal gain. That man is, of course, Alan Greenspan.

It seems Facebook founder Mark Zuckerberg has his own Greenspan. Quite literally. Aaron Greenspan, an ex-classmate of Mark's at Harvard, is attempting to stop Facebook from using its name unless he's paid off -- claiming he used the name Facebook first. Little Greenspan makes me ashamed to call myself a Harvard graduate and even made me think twice about putting on my crimson boxer shorts this morning. Mark, much like myself, is hard at work trying to stimulate the economy in his own way.

With the recent economic turmoil, we here at the Fed have made a commitment to saving companies in trouble. Meanwhile, over at the FAA, they're actively stymieing companies such as American Airlines' (AMR) because of safety concerns regarding "some bundles" that  were not "secured properly".

What is the FAA's line of reasoning behind this? American only has a 2% profile margin as it is, and twice as much debt as it has cash. With the kind of losses created by the FAA's strict regulation and the loss of congressional support to bail them out, will American be able to continue paying their hardworking CEO $10 million in annual compensation? What kind of repercussions will the economy face if his pay needs to be cut?

First Greenspan criticizes my efforts to clean up the subprime mess of an economy he left me, and now former Fed Chair Paul Volcker has accused me of operating at "the very edge" of my legal authority. If rescuing Bear Stearns (and therefore the economy in general) is pushing my authority, then I don't want to be an authority-following quasi-governmental non-elected executive officer.

Paul's very bitter because the president who appointed him (Jimmy Carter) couldn't farm his own peanut, much less expand his legal authority. If there's one thing President Bush taught me (and there is only one thing he taught me), it's that a federal executive has the authority to expand his own authority. My charter was clearly to save the economy through any means necessary.

Your grade school teacher might have misinformed you that there are only three branches of government here in America. There's the Executive, the Legislative, the Judicial and, as a couple reporters just figured out, the Federal Reserve. Here at the Fed, our trustees were appointed in a manner not unlike those in the Judicial Branch, and we all know how crucial it is to allow a group of men independent of accountability to decide imporant issues.

Critics whose minds are crippled by an education in political "science" rather than the true science of economics might object that unlike the other three branches, the Federal Reserve was not established by the constitution. But it's time to adapt our system of government to react to today's fast moving global market.

BusinessWeek has honored me on its cover for my newfound acumen in deal making. Having saved Bear Stearns with a carefully engineered Fed-guaranteed loan to JP Morgan, I've begun to think about a few other companies I can save to stimulate the economy. 

• Arthur Andersen: Enron's accounting firm is down to only 200 employees, but with the right type of risk-free loan we could add a few thousand of the most creative accountants in the business who'll surely boost American corporations' bottom-lines.
• "The Sponge": This popular contraceptive is less effective than condoms at birth control and provide no protection from STDs, so they could increase the size of the US health care industry.
• Friendster: Think of all the American's who invested their time into building Friendster profiles, only to see themselves become completely disconnected from most of their friends and business contacts. We'll be providing Facebook with a loan to acquire Friendster for $2 (not per share, but for the whole company).