Yesterday Ben Bernanke announced a new round of stimulus efforts meant to heat up the economy and drive down unemployment. Known as Quantitative Easing or QE3, the plan will see the Fed buying up at least $40 billion of mortgage backed securities each month. The first two rounds of Quantitative Easing are estimated to have created two million jobs and played a major part in pulling the U.S. back from the brink of an even more severe depression—like a full-on Great Depression. So understandably those paying attention to the world economy (and isn’t that pretty much all of us these days?) championed the move.
Global stock markets promptly went berzerk, rallying 1.5% to 2% worldwide, as Bernanke committed to taking aggressive action until well after unemployment starts to come back down toward normal levels.
While the rest of the world was cheering Bernanke on, one man was standing on the sidelines wearing stinkface: Romney, of course. Think Progress points out the Romney campaign issued a statement poo-pooing the move:
The Federal Reserve’s announcement of a third round of quantitative easing is further confirmation that President Obama’s policies have not worked. After four years of stagnant growth, falling incomes, rising costs, and persistently high unemployment, the American economy doesn’t need more artificial and ineffective measures. We should be creating wealth, not printing dollars. As president, Mitt Romney will enact bold, pro-growth policies that lead to robust job creation, higher take-home pay, and a true economic recovery.
There is a school of thought that disagrees with Bernanke’s approach—the hard-line libertarians and deficit absolutists who think that government has no role in influencing the economy. Ron Paul is probably the most visible of this school.
But the data that Fed stimulus has helped the economy is pretty convincing. Taken together with Romney’s recent insane attack on Obama’s response to the Libyan Embassy riot, it seems more likely that his diss on the Fed is just part of his strategy of needing to present everything the Obama administration does as bad, even if it’s good.
Romney wants to create wealth? Well, yesterday alone many billions were created in stock markets globally in response to the Fed’s plans, and they will probably keep going. But, of course, wealth created on Obama’s watch doesn’t count, right?