Bernanke, You Stupid Bastard

Karl Denninger
Market Ticker
Feb 22, 2011

Yes, you.

And Trichet, and the rest of the Central Bank fools.

But especially you, Bernanke.

There's dumb and then there's really dumb. Let's take a short walk back down history lane.

You were sure there was no housing bubble.

Then you were sure it wouldn't pop.

Then you were sure when the subprime problem hit, that it wouldn't cause a recession.

Then you were sure you had it under control with Bear Stearns' hedge funds.

Then you were sure you had it under control with Bear Stearns itself.

Then you were sure it was under control with Lehman, even though you had to know Citibank and others were refusing their collateral in the repo market.

You were sure QE would support higher bond prices - and lower yields. The exact opposite thing happened.

You were sure QE2 would suppress long end yields. The exact opposite thing happened.

Oh yeah, you made excuses both times, but in fact you publicly said that in both cases the exact opposite thing would happen that did.

Now let's look at what happened just today.

Oil went up almost $7 today for the WTI contract. For each dollar that crude oil rises, we transfer roughly $95 billion (estimates vary from $90-100) outside of the United States.

That's a direct hit to GDP.

In ONE DAY the entire impact of your so-called "QE2" was ERASED.

(As an aside, yes, I can do the math on the direct import numbers; the argument here is on the total economic impact, which is as noted above. Estimates there vary somewhat, but they're centered around $90-100 billion/year/dollar increase.)

Your entire gambit and what you sold to Congress and President Obama was that you could "restart" credit expansion with your policies. Implicit in your policy was a need to do so, because without it you cannot succeed. The World Economic Forum at Davos released a paper saying that we needed, collectively, to add one hundred trillion dollars of new debt to the system to support the paltry growth numbers you and your economists are putting up. Worse, the CBO stuck up numbers in the TBAC report that show another doubling of Federal Debt in the next nine years and a rough quadrupling of debt service costs to $800 billion, implying a paltry 3% blended rate.

We had the collapse starting in 2007 because people couldn't afford the debt they already had and yet your entire scheme, to succeed, requires doubling all systemic debt AGAIN.

So how are you going to do it Ben?

Who's going to take on that debt, and how are they going to service it?

You know damn well it can't work, and won't. You also know damn well you've goaded and prodded the Federal Government into taking on $4.5 trillion in debt we cannot afford, or nearly 30% of GDP.

How are you going to take that back off Bernanke? You keep being asked this, but all you say is that you're confident "you have the tools."

Uh huh.

You don't have jack and you know damn well you can't pull your pump-job back one iota without laying bare on the table the fact that the Federal Government is supporting 12% of GDP with borrowed money. If it disappears we have an instant Depression worse than the 1930s.

The bad news is that if you keep this crap up it will disappear by force of the market, there's not a damn thing you can do to prevent it, and that day is rapidly approaching.

EVERY prediction you've made about the economy over the last five years has been wrong.

All of them.

The market is rising only because you're "promising" infinite leverage.

But infinite leverage means certain financial ruin if you're wrong about external forces. And the economy is not a closed system under your control. You cannot control other nations, you cannot control commodity speculators and you cannot control other central banks and politicians. You think you can force China off their peg, but they can suppress riots longer than we can. You think you can keep printing but now Egypt has gone down, Libya is collapsing and if Saudi Arabia folds you're instantly ****ED and so are the rest of us.

Never mind that it's not just the Middle East. What if Venezuela folds? Mexico goes feral with their drug war? How about South Korea, which now has how many banks closed due to runs?

The longer you keep this crap up the worse the instability will become. Eventually something will break that's important, and then it's too late.

You can't win this game Bernanke. And the longer you keep trying to protect the banks that should have been shut down and taken into receivership in 2007 the more damage you're going to do. When the history books are written on this catastrophe your name is going to be featured in bright lights as the personal architect and chief jackass who pontificated that he knew it all because he studied The Great Depression.

Yeah, you studied it all right. And now you're duplicating the mistakes made then, writ even larger.

There are no statesmen left in this nation when it comes to Congress. Not one who will haul your ass in front of them by force of subpoena, put your clear and public record of "accuracy" in front of you and then demand that you justify your twisting of the clear English language to come up with "2% inflation" as your "interpretation" of STABLE PRICES.

You're going to fail Bernanke. You're failing right now. You've destroyed one nation's government and this evening, as I write this, a second is falling apart. The madman behind the second, Qaddafi, has apparently ordered his military to strafe civilians, murdering hundreds.

But behind it all, your policies and those of your cronies, believing in an indefinite Ponzi Scheme of exponential debt without bound, are responsible for every bit of what's happening today worldwide - and what is to come tomorrow.

The only way you can stop it is to admit you were wrong, pull liquidity and allow the insolvent institutions to collapse. And collapse they will - all of them. I'm convinced you know that too. And I'm also convinced that there's three words you will never utter so long as you infest Washington DC: I ****ed up.

So here we sit as Americans, with no solution. There is nobody in Congress or The Administration that has the balls to stop you, and you're too much of a douche to admit you blew it and do what should have been done three years ago.

As a result, all we have left is to be prepared for what's to come.

It's not going to be pretty, and I hope Americans are ready for it.
Congratulations Ben Bernanke. Your place in history is secure, and I'm sure Beelzebub thanks you daily for your cooperation.

Some day I'm quite sure you'll meet him face-to-face.

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Feb 21, 2011
Karl Denninger

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