It used to be that the Chairman of the Federal Reserve, the Fed, was the guy all the Republicans would invite to their BBQs and country club birthday parties. Not anymore. Ben Bernanke, the former academic and current savior of the American economy, is not liked that much by the GOP. He will be grilled today for his sins.
Bernanke was the architect of Bank of America’s takeover of Merrill Lynch last year. Now, according to e-mails, memos, and rumbling across the hallways, the Republican Party wants his head for apparently betraying their dogma of small government politics. From the NYT:
A memo written by Republicans, citing e-mail and internal Fed documents that were subpoenaed from the central bank, is building a case that Mr. Bernanke was a Machiavellian autocrat who forced Bank of America to go through with a disastrous merger that it no longer wanted to complete.
Republicans are circulating newly unearthed e-mail that suggests Fed officials kept the Securities and Exchange Commission and the Office of the Comptroller of the Currency in the dark about its efforts to keep the merger alive by informally reassuring Kenneth D. Lewis, the chief executive of Bank of America, that the government would provide the bank with extra help if it was needed.
This is horrible news. What a betrayal! Letting all that money be used to extend the reach of the government’s arm. How treacherous! If only Henry Paulson, George Bush’s Treasure Secretary, hadn’t given hundreds of billions of TARP dollars to banks last year to do the exact same thing could the GOP be really really outraged! I wonder if Bernanke will drop this zinger during his session with the House Oversight and Government Reform Committee today.
You might want to check these out, too:
Tags: ben bernanke · gop · The Great RecessionNo Comments
0 responses so far ↓