“SHINE YOUR SHOES, MR. STREET?”

12/15/07

Now that Ben Bernanke’s Rube Goldberg funds auction, liquidity facility scheme failed to provide sufficient succor to the free marketeer tough guys on Wall Street, look for Obsequious Ben to come up with another hasty, ill-conceived, and ultimately ill-fated scheme to attempt to get back into the good graces of the Wall Street self-styled swashbucklers.

Inflation? Who cares? It’s only energy, and that only matters to average people, not the types of people with whom Ben seeks to ingratiate himself. The dollar? Hell, foreigners still take it, so what does Obsequious Ben care? The boys on Wall Street are unhappy with Ben, and he can’t live with that disapproval. Like the sycophantic servant boy who lives to please his master, Ben Bernanke simply cannot tolerate even the slightest hint of unhappiness from Wall Street.

Incidentally, there was an outstanding piece on the Opinion page (in this case, A21) of Friday’s (i.e., 12/14’s) Wall Street Journal concerning the relative flaccidity of the Fed, any Fed, in the face of the current worldwide financial problems. The article “The Global Money Machine,” by David Roche is well worth reading. Mr. Roche’s analysis of the situation is especially cogent, and his last paragraph, the point of which is obvious to those of us with a clear view of the world but that will come as a shock to the “See No Evil” crowd, comfortable in the assumption that “a strong overseas economy will see us through,” is especially chilling. (See the 10/30/07 entry in the Insightful Pontificator. “THE STREET VS. THE VOLCANO.”)