The New Creature From Jekyll Island: Ben Beranke's "Audacity To Lie"

Investment Research Dynamics

Ben Bernanke’s latest book should be titled: “The Audacity To Lie.”

When Ben Bernanke went in front of Congress to lobby for the taxpayer-funded the funding of the TARP bailout of Wall Street, he told Congress that the commercial paper market was melting down and could collapse the financial system and the economy.   The the truth is that “Main Street’s” non-financial commercial paper facilities were in good shape.   During that whole crisis it was Wall Street’s financial commercial paper that was headed lower.

In fact, the Fed knew before Bernanke’s testimony that non-financial commercial paper wasn’t a problem.  The Fed released a research paper about 10 days after TARP went through showing that there was never a problem in non-financial commericial paper.

How do we know that Bernanke knew that non-financial commercial paper wasn’t a problem [during is testimony lobbying for the passage of TARP]?  Because he had, in his “back pocket,” a plan in which he was already working on a Fed-funded commercial paper funding program – he just didn’t tell Congress about it…Bernanke mislead Congress in order to get Taxpayer money for his financial commercial paper funding facility.   You don’t have be under oath to go to jail for lying to Congress – Ben Bernanke should be in jail.  – John Titus on the Shadow of Truth

Ben Bernanke is doing the media circuit to promote his new book, “The Courage To Act.”  A better name for it would be, “The Audacity To Lie.”  As part of his media tour, Bernanke is issuing a “mea culpa” of sorts by stating that a lot bankers should have been prosecuted and put in jail for the crimes they committed which led to the  de facto financial collapse of the system in 2008:

It would have been my preference to have more investigation of individual actions, since obviously everything that went wrong or was illegal was done by some individual, not by an abstract firm.  – Ben Bernanke, October 2015.

However, as you can see from the above illustration, Ben Bernanke was willing participant and enabler of the crimes committed by people running the Too Big To Fail Banks.  The reason he is now willing to open about what occurred leading up to and including the Great Financial Crisis (GFC) is that the statue of limitations enabling him to be prosecuted in connection with any crimes committed has expired.

Is Alan Greenspan the “new” creature from Jekyll Island?  Interestingly, there was a Federal Reserve conference – ironically – on Jekyll Island hosted by the Atlanta Fed in 2010 at which Alan Greenspan was on stage with Bernanke.  Much to Bernanke’s horror, Greenspan began to spill the truth about the degree of criminal activity on Wall Street:  Alan Greenspan spills the beans:  (7:12): There was rampant fraud in a lot of what was going on in these markets…(7:32) Things were being done which were certainly illegal and clearly criminal in certain cases

It appears the Greenspan unwittingly was implicating Bernanke for his unwillingness to enforce the laws which already were in place that could have prevented a significant amount of the fraud which lead to the GFC.

The Shadow of Truth hosted John Titus of Best Evidence to discuss his latest video, They Came From Planet Klepto, in which Titus shows based on some 2009 FOMC meeting transcripts which proves that the Fed’s intent with QE was to keep the banks solvent at the expense of the real economy.   We discuss the criminality of Wall Street, including Ben Bernanke’s participation in the crime spree being committed by the Too Big To Fail Banks: