Bernanke, inflation...and the GOP Crazies!

Federal Reserve Chairman Ben Bernanke - a Bush appointee held over by President Obama - has been attacked relentlessly by every Republican presidential aspirant.  Most notable was Rick Perry's calling Bernanke's monetary expansions "treasonous"  for supposedly doing damage to the dollar and for acting politically rather than prudently.  Perry - demonstrating his usual grace and sophistication - talked about "getting ugly" with Bernanke if he set foot in Texas.

Mitt Romney attacked Bernanke for "over-inflating the amount of currency he's created" and Newt Gingrich, in their primary debates, asserted that Bernanke is "the most inflationary, dangerous and power-centered Fed Chairman in history."  The entire GOP field wants Bernanke sacked.

The brief against Bernanke by Governor Good-Hair  and the rest is that the Fed Chairman is stoking inflation by printing money, presumably to help "Obama" get some dollars flowing into the economy to secure re-election.  More sober voices among professional economists who service the right-wing - but are as evidence-challenged in the real world as the GOP pols - simply decry the threat of inflation "inherent" in Bernanke's monetary expansions.

The truth, of course, is that Bernanke's monetary policies are nothing if not prudent.  (Milton Friedman, conservative economics icon, argued that the biggest problem during the Great Depression was tight money. Bernanke's philosophy and policies as Fed Chair are influenced directly by his reading of Friedman.)

Just by the numbers, inflation is a phantom fear in the current economy. The chart below. from David Leonhardt at the New York Times, shows where Fed Chairmen rank in terms of the inflation during their tenure. Bernanke has been overseeing the lowest inflation in 40 years.  The GOP Presidential aspirants are, true to form, making crazy stuff up...