The rules of being Fed chairman are simple. When you cut rates you make everybody
happy, and when you raise rates you make people unhappy. Your job, of course,
isn’t to make people happy, it’s to steer the economy. But still, you should
be making people happy half the time, on average – when rates are going
down and not up.
Which is why it’s a little surprising to see the punditosphere laying into
Bernanke with such gusto. Jeff
Matthews is positively restrained when compared to Long or Short Capital,
who starts his letter to Bernanke
with "You suck" and gets nastier from there. A few choice bits and
pieces:
You don’t have a backbone and as a result you are slowly and very surely
making our country and our currency irrelevant… you will be our ruin…
Grow a spine you slimy invertebrate…
I feel like I’m at a gathering of the flat earth society or in Zimbabwenomics
101…
Oh, and there are actually some well-aimed substantive barbs in there as well,
about the way the Fed measures inflation and GDP. Read the whole thing, just
not out loud if Ben Bernanke is in the room, please.