Ben Bernanke made some vague, far-reaching statements recently concerning the economy. I won’t go into many of the specifics, for two reasons. The first is that, frankly, you’re on internet, and so the chances of you even finishing this article before moving onto some exotic form of pornography are pretty slim. The second reason is that Bernanke barely said anything, anything at all. Here’s the actual quote:
“If actions taken by the administration, the Congress, and the Federal Reserve are successful in restoring some measure of financial stability — and only if that is the case, in my view — there is a reasonable prospect that the current recession will end in 2009 and that 2010 will be a year of recovery.”
Which roughly translates into “If important people do good stuff, then some other good stuff might happen. But if they don’t, good stuff probably won’t happen.”
To be fair, that’s probably the level of vagueness that he needs to maintain. I feel bad for the man; all of these economic up- and downturns have kicked him in the crotch so many times that his career is beginning to resemble one of the chick fights from “Kill Bill.”
If I were him, I’d carefully prepare the sorts of statements that could never get me in any trouble – statements like “Money can be used for the purchase of goods and services,” “The economy is complex,” or “Most babies are nice.” Of course, I also still get my hand held while crossing the street – so in case you were wondering, there’s any number of reasons as to why I’m not chairing what might be the most important financial institution in the world.
The problem with vague statements – even the non-idiotic ones – is that newsgroups with agendas can twist them however they like.
Go ahead and take a gander below to see why I can’t stand politics; it’s nothing but a huge swarming mess of people trying to be right all at the same time. Keep in mind that these stories are all entirely different and slanted takes on the exact same quote:
From Fox News:
Bernanke: Recession Could End This Year
Fox News is populated by angry cavemen that don’t understand how or why they lost the moral high ground – but they probably assume it was stolen from them by people with liberal arts degrees and studio apartments.
The only way they’ll admit that a national problem even exists is if they can immediately link it to how poor people love to spend all of their food stamps on heroin and rap music instead of a college education. They can’t wait for all of this “economic hoopla” to “blow over” so that they can dedicate the next few years to either making it seem like it wasn’t a very big deal, or somehow linking it all to Bill Clinton. Honestly, the reporting of Fox News is so slanted that if the new president saved a cat from a tree, their headline would probably read “Black Guy Tries to Kidnap Kitten.”
From Reuters:
Bernanke Fears that Recession Could Extend to 2010
Reuter’s, a UK-based reporting service, prides itself on its objectivity. What this means is that Reuters is a hoity-toity agency that’s too high-minded to use words like “terrorist” when paramilitary individuals blow up non-military targets filled with civilians for political/religious reasons. But they certainly don’t mind casual fear-mongering when it comes to one of the top 5 most blasé statements issued by a man so boring that all of his captivating characteristics can be summed up with “beard.”
To their credit, at least they managed not to get another one of their reporters killed in the never-ending quest to smugly not take sides on anything. Furthermore, since the report is being routed through Yahoo, the entire news segment has the special stink of a search engine whose only real source of web-traffic these days is fantasy football.
In my experience, Yahoo’s headlines have always been some of the scariest – I assume this is to garner as many web hits as possible without actually coming to your house and changing your homepage from Google while you sleep. I’m surprised they didn’t try to retitle this “Bernanke Hints that You Might Have to Sell your Second-Born! For Cheap!!”
From the Huffington Post:
These writers make sure to follow up Bernankes comments with some shyly questioning “if” statements. The Huffington Post is probably the sweetest, cutest news source on the web. And when I say that, I mean that they’re the boy who plays the clarinet and still wets his pants every once in a while, even though he’s in the sixth grade.
They’re a well-meaning, self-professed liberal paper that gently, shyly pushes their biases into their stories, so that you’re aware of what they’re doing, you can’t even really get mad with them. Actively criticizing the Huffington Post is like picking on that same sixth grader; what are you really going to do to a kid who couldn’t get a single person to come to his tea party-themed birthday, and who will almost certainly be mock-executed in gym class dodgeball?
…Holy sh*t. I just realized: the Huffington Post might just be Michael Cera with a laptop.
Hi. Good article.
There’s a “the” missing in the first paragraph discussing the Huffington Post. “I mean that they’re (the) boy who plays the clarinet…”
Thanks.
S*
Haha, that’s my bad! Not enough coffee when this one went in (that’s the official excuse). Thanks.
Bernanke is a sort of “experimental” economist. He doesn’t try to understand anything. He just does what he thinks worked in the past. For instance he claims that lack of liquidity induced the great depression of the 1930s, so he deduces that liquidity can cure our economic problems. What he doesn’t realize is that our problems go way beyond lack of liquidity. Our government is too big, a major resource drain on our society, and there are big problems with labor pricing that are diminishing demand for goods and services. Basically we’re all so underpaid that we can’t afford to buy anything. Those are the underlying problems.