Bernanke Bumbling

The lead article in today’s New York Times is titled, “Bernanke’s Bid for a 2nd Term Hits Resistance.” It describes opposition in the Senate to re-appointing Ben Bernanke as head of the Federal Reserve.

Mr. Bernanke helped to shape the highly unpopular bailout of Wall Street and has also been accused of allowing the housing bubble, that helped to cause all our difficulties in the first place. There appears to be opposition to him from both the left and the right, and a vote on his renomination had to be delayed.

Eventually Harry Reid provided a tepid endorsement, but the final result remains to be seem. It appears that nothing is the same after the shocking election in Massachusetts, and the politicians are finally considering the view of Main Street, a good idea if they want to keep their jobs.

Our economic system is so complex that it probably doesn’t make sense to start looking for people to blame. It just upsets the stock market and investors (the Dow is down almost five percent over the past three days), and that really doesn’t help anyone.

The difficult renomination, however, might make Mr. Bernanke think twice when he is adopting new policies, especially with 10 percent of our population out of work, and a good chunk of them, homeless to boot.