Remember when the new Republican majority in the House called Ben Bernanke on the carpet?
Representative Paul D. Ryan of Wisconsin, the new chairman of the House Budget Committee and a vocal skeptic of the Fed’s bond-buying effort, told Mr. Bernanke: “My concern is that the costs of the Fed’s current monetary policy — the money creation and massive balance sheet expansion — will come to outweigh the perceived short-term benefits.”
Mr. Ryan described “a sharp rise in a variety of key global commodity and basic material prices,” and an increase in interest rates of longer-term Treasury securities. And while conceding that American consumers were not yet experiencing substantially higher prices, Mr. Ryan warned that “the inflation dynamic can be quick to materialize and painful to eradicate once it takes hold.”
Ahem:
The little upward blip at the end is drought, not monetary policy.
The point here isn’t that Ryan is a fool; it is that his whole conceptual framework is wrong, wrong, wrong.
And it’s not just cynical (though there’s plenty of cynicism); we keep hearing about Republican politicians who are shorting Treasuries. Here’s an earlier story involving Eric Cantor.