For once, I actually AGREE with Mr. Canfield. There have been so many idiots running around ET over the past several weeks talking about "Helicopter Ben" and how he is constantly Pumping, Pumping, and Pumping, money into the system and being a political "lackey" yet 99% of these morons on ET have never even taken a basic Econ 1. course. The fact of the matter is that up until the 3/4 point emergency rate cut, Bernanke had NOT been pumping money into the system. Anyone with HALF A BRAIN could see that Fed Funds were trading nearly 2 points OVER the yield of the 2-year Treasury Note ( 4.25 vs 2.30 ) and that those sexy little "auctions" at the Discount Rate Window were nothing more than 28 day REPOS ( temporary injections of liquidity ) and nothing permanent into the monetary system. Ben's been so far BEHIND THE CURVE and MARKETS on this that it isn't even funny . . . He's obviously been very late to this economic contraction; either that, or he is more concerned about fueling inflation than a "no-growth" economy. Sometimes I get the feeling that ET is like a sewer full of the most ignorant people in the World. Either that, or it is full of a bunch of college kids trading their student loan money "online" without hardly a clue. I just can't figure out which.
Ben Bernanke was sworn in on February 1, 2006. http://www.newyorkfed.org/markets/statistics/dlyrates/fedrate.html
The sad part is that unless your Joe 6-Pack was a moron or had a hidden agenda, he would probably have run the Fed better than Greenspan did during his tenure. Greenspan's legacy is regrettable. What is Bernanke doing differently?