By Toni Straka
The nomination of Ben Bernanke, head of US President George W Bush's Council of Economic Advisers (CEA), as successor to Federal Reserve Chairman Alan Greenspan has sparked a hot international discussion about the future course of US monetary policy.
The academic world fiercely debates whether Bernanke will be a "hawk" who is not afraid to fight inflationary pressures with higher interest rates or a "dove" who prefers to let the stuttering economy rumble ahead on a cushion of cheap credit. But gyrating capital markets obviously fear the latter.
Ben "Printing Press" Bernanke's reputation is engraved in stone with weary asset managers since he said in a speech in November 2002,"the US government has a technology, called a printing press - or, today, its electronic equivalent - that allows it to produce as many US dollars as it wishes at essentially no cost."
Such a stance certainly pleases Bush who has been running up more debts than any other president in US history and is for this reason actually the biggest enemy to a sound monetary policy in times of rising inflation. Public debt jumped from US$5.8 trillion to more than $8 trillion (that is $8,000,000,000,000) since he took office in 2001, and he is the first president who has never vetoed any costly bill Congress has presented to him.
http://www.atimes.com/atimes/Global_Economy/GJ28Dj01.html