Loose Money and Deficit Spending

President Barack Obama spent over a trillion dollars on projects he claimed were  “shovel-ready” and would prevent the unemployment rate from reaching 8 percent. Federal Reserve Board chairman Ben Bernanke obligingly printed $600 billion with which to buy the president’s IOUs, predicting that running the printing presses would get the economy growing at an annual rate of something like 3.5 percent, and that the low interest rates he was setting would revive the moribund housing market. The result...