As you might have noticed, Bernie Sanders isn’t exactly enamored with the growing divide between the rich and the poor in America.
In fact, the firebrand senator from Vermont hates inequality worse than just about anything else in the world, and he’s pretty clearly willing to make the federal government even more bankrupt than it already is if it means leveling the playing field for the country’s beleaguered masses who have been forced to watch as trillions in QE have made the likes of Jamie Dimon and Lloyd Blankfein billionaires even as wage growth for everyday Americans remains stuck in neutral.
Make no mistake, a big part of why the haves are increasingly better off than the have-nots in America is Fed policy. By inflating the value of the assets most likely to be concentrated in the hands of the rich, you are deliberately exacerbating income inequality. Or, as Hank Paulson put it: “we made it wider!”
Of course Ben Bernanke will tell you this isn’t the case. It’s the whole “wealth effect” idea, whereby driving up stock prices is supposed to make Joe The Plumber feel better about his 401k, which was wiped out in a flurry of collapsing counterparty chaos in September of 2008. Additionally, banks are supposed to be lending their excess reserves thus stimulating the real economy. Only that’s not what’s happened. Mom and pop up and left the market and never came back after the crash and economic growth is so subdued that the credit impulse simply isn’t there.
Instead, all the Fed did was make the rich richer. Much richer. So rich in fact, that Modiglianis are now going for $170 million even as a record number of Americans are on food stamps.
Now that Bernie Sanders has emerged as a very serious contender for The White House and now that the world has suddenly woken up to the fact that central bankers may have no idea whatsoever about what they’re doing, we thought this an opportune time to bring you the following blast from the past, in which Bernie Sanders lambasts Alan Greenspan (the “maestro” of all that’s wrong with the American economy) in a truly epic diatribe that will have you torn between your hatred for central bankers and your aversion to socialism. Enjoy.
"Mr. Greenspan, I have long been concerned that you are way out of touch"...