Ben Bernanke, replacement for the cipher-tastic Greenspan gets all professorial and whatnot out in the crisp mountain air of the Grand Tetons for the Fed annual late summer getaway.
At least they know where to go when the weather is hot, unlike a particular brush-clearing-in-triple-digit-temps Texan who currently resides in the People's House.
But I counterdigress...
The shocking to non-Keynesian laissez-faire-istas statement:
Fed Chief Gives Seminar on History of Globalization - NYTimes.com
If Mr. Bernanke had a message to political leaders, it was that they needed to acknowledge the downsides of globalization in terms of lost jobs, disrupted livelihoods and wrenching change.
"The challenge for policy makers,'' he said, "is to ensure that the benefits of global economic integration are sufficiently widely shared -- for example, by helping displaced workers get the necessary training to take advantage of new opportunities -- that a consensus for welfare-enhancing change can be obtained."
The Business Roundtable, ATR, and Chamber of Commerce just shat themselves. "Widely shared"? Sounds confiscatory from businesses, who will have to retrain or via levied tax increases on businesses so that the evil gubmint can turn the final, marginal tool-and-die worker into a systems analyst and the final domestic systems analyst into some other higher symbolic logic virtual widget pusher.
Bernanke's speech must have gone over like a fart in church over on the Scrooge side of the American financial house.
Perhaps bonddad or another financial type here in the mix can better explain Bernanke's motive for saying what he said, at this particular point in time?
CYA for himself, for some rough sailing ahead in 2007-2008? Running interference for the Administration, to soften the blow when a Democratic-controlled Congress decides to embark on a Greater Society program in early 2007?
Any and all. Make it work.