Just yesterday, Federal Reserve Chairman Ben Bernanke told the Joint Economic Committee of Congress that he believes it's possible that the economy is in recession and that he expects further rises in employment.

The cause is an unsustainable dependency on credit over earnings to get the public to pay for goods produced in other countries by companies that underpay American workers while overpaying CEOs and are given sickening tax breaks by our government. Why should big oil get billions in tax breaks while reporting record earnings?

These inequalities result in consumers being pounded by media to buy products they don't need and to buy them with credit. When things get too expensive, consumers pull back, and the companies respond by laying people off.

In short -- the people have a recession while Wall Street fat cats continue to profit.

He defended bailing out Bear Stearns to prevent the investment bank from declaring Chapter 11, and the Fed opened short-term interest rates to other investment banks to help keep them afloat. Rates have gone as low as they can go without pouring gasoline on inflation and lighting a match.

But when it comes to homeowners, he told the committee that helping them is Congress' job, not the Fed's.

While he has a point about that, it wasn't within the Fed's purview to help out investment banks either, so if he can stretch the Fed's charter there, why not for homeowners?

Credit is as much a problem for consumers as Wall Street. We've created an addiction where 40 percent of us spend more than we earn. We've had a negative savings rate for three years in a row. And with a government that racks up $59 trillion in debt, or $516,000 per U.S. household, we don't have much of an example to follow. We simply can't afford to buy everything that comes on the market. So a couple of million of us are defaulting on our homes and on our credit cards. We're backing off on buying cars and other big ticket items. Jobs are being lost, and still the CEOs go on collecting huge salaries.

Maybe what the Fed can do is sweeten short-term rates with a catch. Better rates for those banks willing to work with consumers to lower their default rates on mortgages and credit cards. Better rates for those banks that lower borrowing rates to consumers on credit cards. Better rates for those banks that keep lending to consumers.

Bernanke's wrong. There is something the Fed can do.

Published: April 3, 2008

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