Senator Bernie Sanders (I-VT) put a hold on Ben Bernanke’s nomination for another shot at heading up the Federal Reserve. Sanders, who has been quite vocal about his concerns with having Bernanke at the helm of the Federal Reserve, said that Bernanke is part of the problem and not the solution. Prior to the vote today, Senator Bernie Sanders said he will vote no:
“The middle class of America is collapsing; we have seen incredible greed, recklessness and illegal behavior on Wall Street. This guy…missed the boat on the most significant economic crisis since the Great Depression,” Sanders said Monday on “Morning Meeting” on MSNBC. “We need a whole new direction in the Fed and in our economic policies. A direction that stands up for a change, not for the rich, not for the top 1 percent, not for the giant financial institutions, but for the working class and the middle class of this country. Nobody thinks that Ben Bernanke is that person.” [Sen. Sanders Website]
This evening, POLITICO reported Sanders saying:
Sanders said Bernanke failed to force Wall Street “to provide adequate credit to small and medium-sized businesses to create decent-paying jobs in a productive economy”; failed to insist that “large bailed-out banks end the usurious practice of charging interest rates of 30 percent or more on credit cards”; failed to break up “too-big-to-fail institutions that took Federal Reserve assistance”; and failed to reveal “which banks took more than $2 trillion in taxpayer-backed secret loans.”
