Paul Ryan to Ben Bernanke

Congressman Ron Paul addressing US Federal Reserve chairman Ben Bernanke, Financial Services Subcommittee on Monetary Policy, July 13, 2011:

“We hear that in the future we’re going to have a better economy and everybody hopes so, but it’s hard for me to believe because I look back on our past three years and what Congress has done and what the Fed has done is literally injected about $5.3 trillion and I don’t think we got very much for it. The national debt went up by $5.1 trillion; real GDP grew by less than one per cent; unemployment really hasn’t recovered – we still have 7 million people that have become unemployed.. one statistic that is very glaring if you look at the charts is how long people are unemployed. The average time used to be 17 weeks – now it’s nearly 40 weeks. Nothing there reassures me.. Also, when we talk about prices, we’re always reassured that there’s not all that much inflation, and we’re told that they might start calculating inflation differently with a new CPI.. of course, we changed our CPI a few years back. There’s still a free market group that calculates the CPI the old-fashioned way. They come up with a figure – despite all this weak economy – that prices have gone up 35%, 9.4% every year, and I think if you just went out and talked to the average housewife, she might believe the 9.4% figure rather than saying it’s only 2%. So I would say what we’ve been doing isn’t very reassuring with all this money expenditure.. Spending all this money hasn’t helped. That $5.3 trillion didn’t go to consumers, it went to buying bad assets, it went to bailing out banks, it went to bailing out big companies.. lo and behold, the consumer didn’t end up getting this, the consumer lost their job, their houses and their mortgages..”