Krugman: Bernanke’s Unfinished Mission
Reading this stuff makes me feel really hopeless, like nothing in this country will ever truly get better. Because no matter what politicians say, it’s bullseye accurate, and nothing will change so long as money so completely dominates politics:
But there’s also, I believe, a question of priorities. The Fed sprang into action when faced with the prospect of wrecked banks; it doesn’t seem equally concerned about the prospect of wrecked lives.
And that is what we’re talking about here. The kind of sustained high unemployment envisaged in the Fed’s own forecasts is a recipe for immense human suffering — millions of families losing their savings and their homes, millions of young Americans never getting their working lives properly started because there are no jobs available when they graduate. If we don’t get unemployment down soon, we’ll be paying the price for a generation.
So it’s time for the Fed to lose that complacency, shrug off that fatalism and start lending a hand to job creation.
