Just a spoonful of sugar helps the medicine go down. This was a delightful little song that many of us learned during our childhood years. Mary Poppins taught us in the movies that by simply planning ahead of time, one could easily circumvent bad experiences. She taught us that bad things don’t have to be bad if you mix them with something good.
I sometimes wonder to myself if this was former Federal Reserve Chairman Ben Bernanke’s favorite song while growing up. I picture him running around his house as a small child singing this Mary Poppins classic to himself. I can’t explain it, but I also picture this child version of Ben Bernanke as having classic male-pattern baldness and an impressively stylish beard. My imagination does have its limits.
Ben Bernanke and the Federal Reserve spent the past seven years trying to help our economic medicine go down… and in the most delightful way. Except their huge-ass spoonful of sugar has a funny name called “quantitative easing”. You see… recessions are like the medicine for our economy. Recessions can taste very unpleasant and make us feel terrible… but underneath the surface, this medicine is actually ridding the body of what ails us. Antibiotics can rid the human body of bacteria and other types of infection. Recessions can rid the economy of terrible loans, overleveraged banks, bad politicians, and irresponsible consumer debt.
In 2008, the United States of America went in for a routine check up and received the worst diagnosis possible. We found out that we did not just need some medicine… we needed chemotherapy. The biopsy report came back as “Stage III Adenosubprimeloaninoma”. Surgical extraction and long-term chemotherapy would be required in order to avoid metastasis.
But then something happened… our modern-day Mary Poppins at the Federal Reserve stepped in and told us that recessions are something that must be avoided at all costs. He warned us that this prescribed chemotherapy would be severe and that it would make us feel awful for the foreseeable future. He cancelled our chemotherapy completely and told us that all we really needed was a spoonful of sugar. When we failed to get better, he gave us another spoonful of sugar… and then another. Then he told us that we should be on an intravenous infusion of sugar until we started feeling better. Now we feel fat and bloated with serum blood sugars over six hundred and we have a large mass near our liver… we wonder to ourselves why we still feel bad… and then we come to the sudden realization… Ben Bernanke is not a doctor and he sure as hell ain’t Mary Poppins.
