The Fed is going to go bankrupt

It’s certainly a daring prediction from Jim Rogers. I very much like how he points out that the Federal Reserve is the THIRD central bank in the United States. Central banks are neither omnipotent nor eternal, they are merely financial parasites on the nation, and like any other parasite, they have a finite lifespan. One merely hopes that like the previous two, the current central bank will not outlive its host.

I particularly enjoyed this exchange:

“Bernanke seems to be out of ideas recently.”

“Mr. Bernanke’s been out of ideas since he went to Washington. What’s wrong with you? He’s just an Ivy League professor. Are you kidding? Why do people think he knows anything? For God’s sake, I went to an Ivy League school. They didn’t know anything.”

Unlike most Fed observers, I have actually read Mr. Bernanke’s Essays on the Great Depression. The primary thing I took away from it was that he places too much stock in government statistics and far too much faith in monetary policy. He’s less an economist than an econometricist.