Have you ever had a holiday vacation on Martha’s Vineyard? So boring! Once you get over the “Ah and there’s where Ted Kennedy crashed his car and drowned that lady” historical thing — sorry, Denby! — you realize it’s just a place full of crappy tourist shops and terrible humid boiling weather and a bunch of ugly gated beach mansions surrounded by swamps, bogs and discarded “lobster rolls.” How to jazz it up? Barack Obama decided to go on the teevee to announce what everybody already knew he was doing: giving Ben Bernanke another term. MORE »

Hey, a new survey about things people don’t know: Gallup asked some random selection of Americans who haven’t had their phones shut off to rate nine major federal agencies they may or may not have heard about, on the AM radio. The results are … bad news for, let’s see, Ben Bernanke? Sure! MORE »

Barack Obama ate a hamburger… Sarah Palin got a gun… torture, they’re still going on about that… Sean Hannity is insane… what else today? Oh right, the thing, the thing where goods and services are bought and sold and jobs and money and stuff! Ben Bernanke said optimistic things about it today, albeit with a tragically ambiguous, stinging back: “Federal Reserve Chairman Ben S. Bernanke said today that the nation’s rate of economic contraction may be slowing and that he expects growth to resume later this year, but he also suggested that the economy could perform well below its potential for years to come.” What is this nonsense about the American economy having “potential”? Like building GREEN CARS and shit? [Washington Post]

Whoops you must keep an eye on this frisky new Preznet of ours, because every time you turn your back on him he’s sneaking off to deliver another speech on the economy. So we come to this one in medias res, because that makes it more exciting and suspenseful. MORE »

Wasn’t the Fed supposed to cut rates in half today, from 1 percent to 0.5 percent? Well, that wasn’t good enough, for this failed economy and economic system. So now it’s “near zero,” which means “zero.” Just like Japan tried for years and years, to no effect! The Federal Reserve Bank is now out of “traditional ammunition,” according to almost-president Barack Obama, and your government is now printing money at an insane pace, and then banks are taking this money and immediately buying U.S. Treasury bonds, because nothing else is safe, and that is pretty much the end of this particular feedback loop. MORE »

The Federal Reserve this afternoon is expected to cut the fed funds rate from 1% to .5%, a modern record. The government is printing more money than you can shake a stick at, all night, every night, to give to financial companies. This should be an incredibly sexy time to make LOANS. Overnight loans, car loans, Truck Nutz loans, who cares, loans loans loans, free money! The only problem is that we’ve developed a terrorist’s mindset in which the American economy, as a whole, has become the enemy. MORE »

Keeping accord with weekly tradition, Wonkette channeled its insomnia at 4:30 a.m. this Monday morning to a week-old version of the New Yorker magazine, online, so as to scan for a “politics article.” There was a Ben Bernanke profile, which is EXACTLY what we asked our parents to get us for Christmas, at Best Buy. Jesus Christ, it is a long one though. Shorter than, say, Billy Budd, but easily twice as long as Bartleby. Anyway, Bernanke’s friends suck: “Bernanke was frustrated by the attacks on his policies, especially when they came from academics whose work he respected. If he moved slowly, people on Wall Street accused him of timidity. If he brought rates down sharply, academic economists accused him of going soft on inflation.” Aww shucks. [New Yorker]

Money-printing liquidity trapper Ben Bernanke has been a Local Loser in recent months after rapidly cutting the federal funds rate to negative 1,000% to no effect whatsoever, except national embarrassment. He’s had to print Master Paulson’s money, alone, every night, as punishment. He is not allowed to shave. But as Paulson and his flack Neel “Chump” Kashkari refuse to do anything right, Bernanke’s had enough and he’s just going to sing it from the rooftops of America! Today, in a big speech, he declared that the “government must step up efforts to prevent home foreclosures, with options including buying delinquent mortgages and providing bigger incentives for refinancing loans.” Meanwhile, back in their lair, Paulson and Kashkari are discussing what evil they must next bring to the global economy. MORE »

So here are three major factors that contributed to our country’s world’s current financial misfortunes: prolonged periods of historically low interest rates (even negative real interest rates), the complete deregulation of such derivatives as credit default swaps, and encouragement from Washington that the inflated housing boom was nothing to worry about. It’s rare that you can pin so many large factors on one person, but, well, former Fed chief Alan Greenspan set the low interest rates, led the pressure on Congress to keep derivatives markets wholly deregulated, and was the voice from Washington that said everything was fine. MORE »

Oh, so our president is giving a press conference, talkin’ about the economies and offshore drilling and such? It’s a slowish news day, so we might as well liveblog this dealy. Fix yourself a triple Wonkettini and join us after the jump for whatever jokes we can muster about the limp Dow, and smacking Fannie into a state of renewed arousal. MORE »

While the economy continued to melt down over the weekend, Federal Reserve Chairman Ben Bernanke spent a few hours hiding from his life at a Washington Nationals baseball game! Alas, he could not escape his horrible, horrible sadness: “Like at every other professional sporting event, a couple minutes is devoted to throwing out free t-shirts and Ben went after a free t-shirt last night like a man possessed. I have rarely seen such intensity in the eyes of a human being. …Yet, the look of agony upon Ben’s face when the t-shirt slipped through his finger tips struck me as odd.” It’s just one thing after another for this guy, right? [The Foodandbeermonger]