Bernie Sanders Clueless on the Fed

Patron saint of Liberal radio and websites, Socialist senator Bernie Sanders, questioned Bernanke this week, and he asked one reasonable question, namely, why not break up the top 6 banks if they are all 'too-big-to-fail'. Bernanke said he thought incentives in Dodd-Frank would better address the incentive problems. I'm not so sure. I would prefer the simplicity of having a maximum asset size than the open-ended regulatory gibberish in Dodd-Frank.

Then Sanders asked why the Fed does not provide low-interest loans to small businesses, to help kick-start the economy (see video here). He even threw out a number, $15 Trillion. Bernanke noted that the Fed has no structure to underwrite or service general loans to businesses. Sanders thought that this would be no different than offering back-stop liquidity to banks, oblivious to the insanely large amount of infrastructure needed for that to work.

That's just insanely ignorant, and highlights how the socialist mindset fails to appreciate the reasons why markets, and the firms that comprise them, are more efficient than government. It reminds me of Lenin's assumption that nationalizing industry would be trivial because business was strictly accounting, or more recently, the faith in shovel-ready projects. There are many stupid Republicans, but this really sets a new bar.