MacroScope

Watching Ben Bernanke testify before Congress in recent years, it’s hard to shake the feeling that this is a Fed Chairman who has been largely abandoned by his own party. Hearing after hearing, Bernanke receives steady support and praise Democrats for his efforts to stimulate a fragile economic recovery – and takes constant heat from Republicans for what they perceive as the possible dangers of low interest rates.

Many people forget Bernanke was first nominated to his current role by a conservative Republican president, George W. Bush. Bush, though he was reappointed to a second term by President Barack Obama. Bush first named Bernanke to the Fed’s board in 2002, then brought him to the White House to lead his Council of Economic Advisors.

In his recent biannual testimony on monetary policy, Bernanke had quite the exchange with Bob Corker, a Republican Senator from Tennessee. The tone of his question was immediately confrontational:

Corker: When the Fed decided it was going to stimulate a global currency war, as it did, did you embark on that thinking, well, you know, our country’s in trouble, and let’s — sort of the heck with everybody else, or did you think it would leverage the wealth effect, if you will, if everybody had a race to the bottom? I know the Fed has been really purposeful in trying to create this sort of faux wealth effect. Did you think it would multiply your efforts?

Bernanke: we’re not engaged in a currency war. We’re not targeting our currency. The G-7 put out a statement, which was very clear, that it’s entirely appropriate for countries to use monetary policy to address their domestic objectives; in our case, employment and price stability.

Massachusetts’ rookie Senator Elizabeth Warren was out making waves again at a Senate Banking Committee hearing on Capitol Hill today. The former Harvard law professor contrasted the legal code affecting drug prosecutions with what she depicted as cushy settlements for large Wall Street firms that committed egregious crimes.

Take Standard Chartered. They were fined $667 million by U.S. regulators for breaching sanctions related to Iran and three other countries. Yet the bank posted a tenth straight year of record profits.

If you’re caught with an ounce of cocaine, the chances are good you’re going to jail. But evidently, if you launder nearly a billion dollars for drug cartels and violate international sanctions, your company pays a fine and you go home and sleep in your own bed at night. I think that’s fundamentally wrong.

Federal Reserve Chairman Ben Bernanke may be keeping quiet about his future plans, but he sure doesn’t sound like someone planning to seek Senate support for a third term at the helm of the U.S. central bank.

In unapologetic and sometimes testy exchanges before the Senate Banking Committee on Tuesday, the Fed chief defended his record and dismissed one Senate critic in unusually blunt terms.

“None of the things you said are accurate,” Bernanke told Bob Corker, a Republican senator from Tennessee, who accused the Fed of deliberately starting a global currency war and of printing money to bail out big Wall Street banks.

U.S. senators want bankers to eat their broccoli before gorging on taxpayer bread.

The Senate Banking Committee took a Treasury Department official to task for committing $250 billion of the $700 bailout money to buy stakes in banks without getting any guarantees that those firms wouldn’t pocket the cash or use it for acquisitions.

“I remain especially concerned that, in the Treasury’s zeal to make the capital injection program easily digestible for the banks, we’re feeding them a little too much dessert and not making them eat enough of their vegetables,” says New York Democratic Sen. Charles Schumer.