Bernanke certainly has chutzpah. Major banks have had big problems with their SIVs (Special Investment Vehicles), subsidiaries set up to keep nasty stuff off their balance sheet and hide it from regulators and the investing public. Well guess what? The Fed has set up a SIV, to be managed by Blackrock, so that we won’t see the fate of the Bear Stearns paper for which it paid $30 billion of our money.

It is now clear that Bernanke is just playing the dirty Wall Street games and the heck with laws, regulations and the taxpayer. When this goes on in other countries it is disparaged as “crony capitalism“. Here, it is the normal course of governing.