from SLATE:
Rick Perry Warns of Fed "Treason"
GOP hopeful accuses Ben Bernanke of playing politics with financial
policy to help Obama.
By Josh Voorhees | Posted Tuesday, Aug. 16, 2011, at 10:35 AM EDT
Rick Perry was in Iowa on Monday for his first full day of campaigning
since he officially entered the race for the White House. While the
Texas governor was quick to criticize the two men who appear to be
standing directly in the way of his potential 2012 victory – GOP
frontrunner Mitt Romney and President Obama – his strongest words
were, somewhat surprisingly, directed at Federal Reserve Bank Chairman
Ben Bernanke.
“If this guy prints more money between now and the election, I don’t
know what you all would do to him in Iowa, but we would treat him
pretty ugly down in Texas,” Perry said. “Printing more money to play
politics at this particular time in American history is almost
treacherous – or treasonous in my opinion.”
Perry was referring to what is called quantitative easing (or, QE in
Beltway wonk speak), in which a central bank creates new electronic
money to buy corporate and government debt in an effort to lower
borrowing costs. The U.S. has already conducted two rounds of QE and
several top investors and analysts have predicted that the Fed will
embark on a third round later this year, the Guardian notes.
“We’ve already tried this,” Perry added at the backyard campaign
event. “All it’s going to be doing is devaluing the dollar in your
pocket and we cannot afford that. We have to learn the lessons of the
past three years that they’ve been devastating. The President of the
United States has conducted an experiment on the American economy for
almost the last three years, and it has gone tragically wrong and we
need to send him a clear message in November of 2012 that new
leadership is coming.”
ABC News followed up with the GOP hopeful after the event to clarify
if he thought that the Fed was playing politics to try to help Obama.
Perry responded: “If they print more money between now and this
election, I would suggest that’s exactly what’s going on.”
Here’s David Weigel’s take:
All the focus seems to be on the implied threat here, but that's
not really surprising. We live in a time of heated political rhetoric.
Ask Joe Biden about it.
No, the strange part of this is the implied agreement that it
would be good for the economy to let the Fed print more money. After
all, if it was being done "to play politics," we assume that there
would be a political benefit to the Fed's action. The Fed's action may
be good for the economy, may be good for employment. So Perry is
classifying as "treason" something that would boost the economy, but
sounds bad. There's a strong case to be made that he's completely
wrong about this.
And Ezra Klein’s:
If you ignore the implied threat of violence against the head of
America's central bank, Perry's position is unremarkable in today's
Republican Party. But that is perhaps what is so remarkable about it.
The GOP's turn against monetary policy is one of the most
consequential and underdiscussed trends in economic policy.
It was the conservative icon Milton Friedman, after all, who
pioneered the argument that the Great Depression was largely the fault
of poor monetary policy. His analysis had the dual advantages of being
both true and useful to skeptics of government spending. It implied
that there were more ways to prevent and respond to recessions than to
simply have Congress take out the credit card.
Liberal bloggers at Think Progress caught Perry’s remarks on camera.
If you watch the video you’ll see that after being asked a question
from the audience, Perry initially said he’d “take a pass on the
Federal Reserve right at the moment to be real honest with you,”
before launching into his longer answer.
--
Jim Devine / "As far as the laws of mathematics refer to reality, they
are not certain; and as far as they are certain, they do not refer to
reality." -- Albert Einstein
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