Banks as existential but uncontested Evil of the world economy (about the 2022 Nobel prize in economics)

The author examines the complex of reasons that prompted the Nobel Committee to award the Nobel Prize in Economics for 2022 to former Federal Reserve System chairman B. Bernanke (2006-2014). The award was granted not only to B. Bernanke, now a leading researcher at the Brookings Institute (Washington, D.C.), as well as to two other American economists - a professor at the University of Chicago, Booth School of Business D. Diamond and a professor of Washington University (St. Louis, Missouri) F. Dybvig for their research of the mechanism of the banking system functioning during financial crises. It is emphasized that the awarding of the Nodel prize to B. Bernanke and two other American economists was politically biased and intended to “rehabilitate” the monetary policy pursued by the FRS in 2007-2009 during the Great Recession. In the long run it led in the early 2020s to record inflation rate in 40 years. During his tenure as Chairman of the Fed, Bernanke, as a supporter of the monetary theory of the Great Depression of the 1930s, proposed in 1963 by the head of the Chicago School of monetarists M. Friedman, deliberately departed from the main regulatory norm of the former monetary policy, formulated in 1993 by Stanford University professor J. Taylor (the so-called “Taylor rules”). It provided for the constant excess of the federal fund rate over the current inflation rate in order to keep the consumer price index growth under constant control of the US monetary authorities. As a result of arbitrary actions by the FRS under the leadership of B. Bernanke, at the end of 2008 the federal fund rate was lowered to zero, and since then it has been consistently below the inflation index. As a result, in the early 2020s, the Fed lost control over inflationary processes in the American economy. These actions of the Fed were a direct consequence of the incorrect diagnosis made by B. Bernanke. He stated that the main threat to the American economy in XXI century, as in the 1930s, is a hypothetical deflationary mode of operation, although since the end of World War II the US economy functioned exclusively in an inflationary mode. Combined with the uncontrolled use of the printing press and exorbitant lending in the period 2007-2009 the Fed managed to minimize the crisis in the US banking system, in fact, to save it, at the cost of transforming the so-called “liquidity trap” into a “debt trap”. The Nobel Prize was awarded to B. Bernanke by the Swedish Central Bank for saving both the American and the leading segments of the world banking system, however, at present, the general population and various sectors of the real economy have to pay for such experiments in monetary policy.

Nobel Prize in Economic Sciences for 2022, B. Bernanke, D. Diamond, Ph. Dybvig, banking system crisis model, M. Friedman, monetary theory, great Depression, great recession, deflation, inflation, liquidity trap, debt trap