I actually thought Mr. Bernanke performed OK this time around.
But....................Representative Maxine Waters (D-CA) wounded him at the end with two questions:
1) Asking him why Mrs. John Mack of JP Morgan fame was able to, along with her connected girlfriend, put up $20 Million to obtain a $220 million non-recourse loan through TALF when qualified minorities cannot get a dime. A very symbolic question about why a lot of this stuff supposedly to improve the economy is actually still back door shoveling of money to banker types.
Bernanke claimed not to have read the Rolling Stone article, although he termed it wrong. When Waters pressed him further about details as to who did or did not have access to the funding, he essentially said that couldn't really be done. So he couldn't address her question about minority participation.
2). She asked him whether the Fed had a conflict of interest regarding the BAC settlement negotiations as BAC is partly owned by the Fed. Bernanke said that is incorrect as it is partly owned not by the Fed, but by the Richmond Reserve.
Well - " The Richmond Reserve is one of 12 reserve banks that, together with the Board of Governors, MAKE UP the Federal Reserve System ". Mr Bernanke was far less than accurate.
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Finally (for now), none of the congressional questioners asked the OBVIOUS QUESTION.
- Given that all but 4 states must enact balanced budgets by July 1, someone should have asked the chairman about the impact of this on jobs/the economy GOING FORWARD. Many of them mentioned cuts having already occurred. But the vast majority of teacher, state and local layoffs haven't shown up yet. They are not presently accounted for in new claims statistics. These only now go through the week ending 7/2/11. But they will be shortly - resulting in my oft-stated opinion that the four week moving average of new claims will exceed 500k by Labor Day.
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