NY Times, Bernanke's Unfinished Mission, Paul Krugman

Paul, as you are aware much more than lives are being wrecked by federal reserve inaction. Unemployment at the ten percent level sounds less intimidating than the real 15 to 17 percent when the underemployed are included in the data. Wrecked lives, destroyed hopes, broken wills and spirits, increased crime, devastated dreams, split marriages, increased deprivation are little encouragement for people who are told to hold steady since better days must assuredly be on the way. Your figure of the nation's need to create, restore, manufacture 300,000 jobs per month over five years is totally on target. Your analysis is real world, a real time identification of the goals we must meet to bring this nation truly back from the edge.


Where is the fervor, intensity, energy, immediacy that we witnessed as the fed bailed out banks, investment institutions, and wall street? Instead the fed gives us words; sprouts, shoots, formidable head winds, slower than expected job growth, these all confront the unemployed on a daily basis, in short a real confidence builder?


Recent articles in the Times and other publications on China's employment growth point to the importance of capital availability to create jobs in any society. Photos, accompanied by news reports, showing Chinese consumers driving new Hummers, enjoying personal use of goods and services, elevating their dreams and satisfying their wants are everywhere. Yet, we are a nation given by the fed, verbal shoots and sprouts, hope for a better day, all of which are doing little for people who have given up the hope of looking for and finding a job.


While loss of productivity continues to impede the nation's growth in development and progress, many of our educated workers and productive citizens are serving in the most menial of capacities, if working at all. I have a friend, with his Ph.D. a great teacher, admired in the classroom by students and administrators alike, being offered adjunct teaching at one course a semester, for a pittance instead of a living wage. I would like to see Wall street workers live daily and manage a home on that salary. Willing to work, industrious, productive, unquestioned expertise in his field, being ignored in this time of recession being told of sprouts and shoots. This lack of fed involvement in job creation is resulting in our largest brain drain in history.


The federal reserve staff and governors should have been actively involved in a major way in this jobs summit. Like it or not, the Chairman now must exercise strong leadership and move the institution toward alleviating this growing economic cancer which threatens to give us a third world country.


Food banks open 24/7 to address the demand of formerly productive American workers who are the finest and hardest working employees in the world. Job growth daily in China, India, Singapore, other countries resulting in spending, elevation in the quality of life for people, Yet we have become the nation of sprouts and shoots, of formidable headwinds which apparently must be accommodated by the fed with mere window dressing. Where would we be if our founders and subsequent leaders offered sprouts, broken promises and anemic plans in facing the nation's challenges of the past. We would not have become America. The federal reserve can spur this effort at this point in time and return the nation to employment growth and individual hope.

Dr. Phillips

Bloomington, IL