Bernanke's Optimistic Appraisal

Federal Reserve Chairman Ben Bernanke said today that the world economy is starting to emerge from the recession.

I'll take his word for it. I studied economics in college — Arts and Sciences required students to pass two semesters of principles of economics, which I did. But that was not my major.

I suppose that, if I had the answers that would speed things up and get an economic recovery started, I'd occupy a seat on the Fed with Bernanke. But I don't. I guess I'm like most Americans. I just hope that they make the right decisions to keep this country moving in the right direction.

I guess that assumes that we are moving in the right direction. I suppose that is the kind of thing one has to take on faith.

Well, Bernanke sounded hopeful today. "[T]he prospects for a return to growth in the near term appear good," he said.

Much of what he said was kind of obvious.

"One very clear lesson of the past year — no surprise, of course, to any student of economic history, but worth noting nonetheless — is that a full–blown financial crisis can exact an enormous toll in both human and economic terms."

Obvious. Hundreds of thousands of Americans are bracing themselves for the loss of their unemployment benefits in the near future. How are those people going to survive? How will they pay for food, clothing and shelter?

"A second lesson — once again, familiar to economic historians — is that financial disruptions do not respect borders. The crisis has been global, with no major country having been immune."

Again, nothing new there.

Well, if you want to read his remarks in full, you can do that here.

On Wall Street, they probably didn't take the time to read everything that Bernanke said. They got that he was sounding a hopeful note, and stocks closed at new highs for 2009.

And home sales set a new record.

All that is good news for the Obama administration, I guess.

But, for millions of Americans, things aren't going to get better until they have a job and a paycheck.

Until then, health care reform really doesn't matter much, does it?

I Could While Away the Hours ...

"... conferrin' with the flowers, consultin' with the rain ..."

Well, that makes about as much sense to me as some of the things I'm witnessing.

Here's a good example. Today, Fed chief Ben Bernanke told Congress that the pace of the economic decline appears to have slowed, but unemployment is likely to stay high for another two years.

So what happened on Wall Street? The Dow Jones industrial average closed at its highest level since two weeks before Barack Obama took the oath of office.

Ever get the feeling that the Scarecrow from the "Wizard of Oz" is running things on Capitol Hill? Or Wall Street?

Maybe he's running the Cambridge, Mass., police department, which arrested Harvard University professor Henry Louis Gates Jr. at his home last week. Charges against Gates, who is black and is also a law professor who spent a couple of years working on a documentary on Abraham Lincoln that was shown on PBS earlier this year to mark the occasion of Lincoln's 200th birthday, have been dropped, but they never should have been filed in the first place.

Apparently, Gates returned from a trip to China to discover that his front door was jammed. He managed to open the back door of his home with a key, but he was unsuccessful in his attempt to open the front door from the inside. Gates, the director of Harvard's W. E. B. Du Bois Institute for African and African American Research, had been in his residence for a few minutes when a police officer arrived and asked him to step outside. He said he had received a report of a possible break–in.

Gates produced his driver's license and his Harvard ID, but that apparently wasn't sufficient for the police officer. Gates was arrested on charges of disorderly conduct and taken to jail, where he spent the next four hours.

Seems to me the driver's license and the Harvard ID should have been enough to make the police officer aware of the identity of the man he was speaking to.

Maybe Gates could have handled things better, but my guess is he was tired after returning from a trip to a country halfway around the world. Presumably, his luggage was nearby and he must have had his passport and airline ticket stub handy.

Surely, that would have been enough to convince the police officer — unless his head was harder than the Tin Man's.