THOMAS J. DONAHUE
The United States has an unusual set of laws with respect to paying the nation’s bills. Congress must vote for the budget which authorizes and triggers the buying and spending. Then when it comes to paying for what has been bought, Congress must vote again to raise the debt ceiling so the national can pay for what Congress has already directed to be bought. Congress, in 2012 and 2013, voted to spend the money and then balked at authorizing the administration to borrow the money to pay the bills.
The Chairman of the Federal Reserve Board, creatively found alternatives that the Fed had never used before and almost all experts did not even realize that were possible. He and Treasury Secretary Paulson, almost certainly saved the American system of capitalism. But in the process, they in the early stages and Bernanke throughout the crisis took a number of steps to save the system where the very people and companies whose actions had triggered the entire crisis seemed to personally benefit while most Americans were hurt badly and none of them received any immediate personal benefits the way the large bankers did. The amount of money that Bernanke and his Federal Reserve Board associates spend was staggeringly large and that too distressed many Americans. Almost all of the money was actually returned to the taxpayers as a result of the work of the Fed and the Treasury officials, but no one could feel good about the unfair disparity that had so benefitted much of Wall Street particularly and Main Street and the rest of American only generally while so many lost their jobs, their homes, their dignity and their hopes. Only the big banks and bankers also got a personal huge windfall of taxpayer money and took no risk for that. The alternative would have ruined everyone and even have been worse for the average citizen.
