Ben Bernanke

Jennifer Rubin: "For Obama, it’s all about getting out of Afghanistan"

We must repeal the Obamacare plan for Medicare says... Dick Gephardt?

Well, that's reassuring -- Bernanke is clueless.

"Wal-Mart: Our shoppers are 'running out of money'"

"McConnell Turns the Tables on Budget Vote."

The Ben Bernanke word cloud: "For bonus points try to find the word 'jobs' in there."

If Barack Obama were looking for a further boost in his popularity from the new jobs data, he'd be disappointed.

“Don’t worry, be happy,” songwriter Bobby McFerrin instructed. But that was in 1988, at the close of Ronald Reagan’s successful presidency.

It didn't take long for the Federal Reserve to come under fire for its resumption of asset purchases, aka "QE2", announced at the Federal Open Market Committee meeting on November 3.

This is a tale of two printing presses.

The Federal Reserve’s decision last week to initiate another round of quantitative easing has had its defenders and its critics.

On November 2, voters gave Republicans historic gains in the House and above-average gains in the Senate in a vote for reduced spending, less intrusive government, and low taxes. On November 3, the Federal Reserve voted to resume direct purchases of Treasury securities in order to promote economic growth. One downside will be the further depreciation of the dollar. Another will be the spectre of future inflation as all America's bills must come due eventually.

Thomas Hoenig, president of the Federal Reserve Bank of Kansas City, is the only significant public official on record in opposition to the easy-money, zero-interest-rate monetary policy being pursued by Fed chairman Ben Bernanke. So there were multiple layers of irony when Hoenig journeyed to Lenexa, Kansas, on September 23 to deliver a dinner speech to the Hope for America Coalition, a local affiliate of the Tea Party movement.

It’s the policies, stupid. That should be the guiding light for everyone trying to figure out the course of the U.S. economy for the rest of the year.

"Bewitched, bothered and bewildered," warbled Ella Fitzgerald, among others. That old song, written in 1940 by Lorenz Hart and Richard Rogers, just about describes what is going on in the American economy.

Concerns over the public debt make it highly unlikely that the government will pass any sort of fiscal stimulus anytime soon. Of course, that might not make much of a difference -- Congress passed stimulus bills in 2008 and 2009 and a much smaller jobs bill this year, and the economy is still sluggish and we still have lost net 2.4 million jobs since February 2009.