Global Economic Crisis

The American weekly news magazine, Time, has an annual ritual of naming the man, woman, or people of the year. Its selection for 2009 is now official, and it is none other than  the Chairman of the U.S. Federal Reserve, Ben Bernanke. Here is Time magazine’s rationale for picking Bernanke:

“The main reason Ben Shalom Bernanke is Time’s Person of the Year for 2009 is that he is the most important player guiding the world’s most important economy. His creative leadership helped ensure that 2009 was a period of weak recovery rather than catastrophic depression, and he still wields unrivalled power over our money, our jobs, our savings and our national future. The decisions he has made, and those he has yet to make, will shape the path of our prosperity, the direction of our politics and our relationship to the world.”

I think the praise being heaped on Bernanke by Time is premature, to say the least. No doubt, the massive borrowing and money printing facilitated by the Fed did prevent a total financial collapse in 2008, after the collapse of Lehman Brothers-a disaster that Time conveniently forgets Bernanke’s monetary policies helped to facilitate. The consequences of Bernanke’s policies, all born of extreme desperation, are totally off the radar screen as far as Time Magazine is concerned. In my view, Bernanke has sown the seeds of a far worse economic catastrophe than that which he is praised for preventing. Bernanke has begun a process that will destroy the U.S. dollar, and bring about the sovereign fiscal collapse of the United States. In effect, Ben Bernanke has not saved the economy; he has postponed one disaster in order to enable a catastrophe that will be far worse.