Nobel Prize for Inflation?!

16 Oct
Ben Bernanke Predicts

Nobel Prize for Inflation?!

Helicopter Ben Bernanke recognized for… for what exactly?  Spreading around free money!

 The Royal Swedish Academy of Sciences has awarded its 2022 Nobel Prize in Economics to former Federal Reserve Chairman Ben Bernanke.

We don’t mean to be churlish with our headline calling it an award for inflation.  We just mean to be plain-spoken.  Inflation is exactly what Bernanke’s stewardship has gifted us.  Anyone looking at the bailout of the banksters in 2008-9, the double-digit increases in food prices, the rip-roaring higher energy prices and the everyday cost of living today has Ben Bernanke to thank.

It is not just we who are saying so.  Michael Shedlock headlines the award story this way:  Former Fed Chair Ben Bernanke Wins Nobel Prize For Wrecking the Economy.

Not to be outdone, The Committee to Unleash Prosperity newsletter puts it like this:   Ben Bernanke Wins Nobel Prize For Being Wrong On The Subprime Housing Crisis.  

That works, too.

In fact, we should expect just such awards from the Nobel judges.  The newsletter from the Committee to Unleash Prosperity points out that, “most winners of the Nobel prize in economics have been awarded to big-government Keynesians.  And most of the medal winners have an abysmal record of predicting the future. Remember, more than 14 Nobel laureates in economics wrote a joint letter in the New York Times last year assuring us that Biden’s policies would NOT cause inflation.”

David Stockman’s take is equally full of disdain:  “Oh, puleese! Ben Bernanke got the Nobel Prize for his early 1980s work on, well, why banks exist! That’s right. What all students of banking knew 100 years ago—-that banks are inherently risky because they lend long and borrow short—got gussied up into a fancy theory of ‘maturity transformation.’”

Shedlock imagined up a spoof interview with Bernanke that would go something like this:

Shedlock: Why do you think you won the Nobel Prize? 

“To learn how to save the economy, we first had to wreck it. That’s the real reason I won the prize,” said Bernanke. “And boy did we wreck it.”

“I expect to win another prize in 2025,” added Bernanke. 

“I paved the way for the Powell Fed to learn from my mistakes. QE and bank bailouts created an even bigger housing bubble under Powell than I created.”

Bernanke shares the prize with theorists Douglas W. Diamond and Philip H. Dybvig “for research on banks and financial crises.”  We don’t know them or their work, and we’re not going to look it up.