In Fed We Trust Poem by gershon hepner

In Fed we trust,
not expecting hanky-panky,
but may go bust
despite the efforts of Bernanke.
When there’s a panic
in Wall Street we expect the Fed
to fight Satanic
forces. Although God is dead,
the Fed survives,
and since it manages our money
we live our lives
as though the money were not funny,
which it is,
because we’ve borrowed it from China.
The Fed’s a whiz,
providing, like a forty-niner,
the gold for fools
it stores inside a Fort Knox vault,
with all the tools
that help us to delay default,
which defies
all common sense because we know
they tell us lies
about how much we’re going to owe,
and how much
our children and grandchildren must
pay when the clutch.
arrives and we are dead as dust.
I’m depressed,
because I have some common sense;
we can’t invest,
I much regret, in Providence.


Inspired by Michiko Kakutani’s review of “In Fed We Trust: Ben Bernanke’s War on the Great Panic, ” and “A Colossal Failure of Common Sense: The Inside Story of the Collapse of Lehman Brothers, ” by Lawrence G McDonald and Patrick Robinson (“Inside the Meltdown: Financial Ruin and the Race to Contain It” (NYT, July 21,2009) :
A year ago it would have been hard to imagine a book about the Federal Reserve and Treasury Department making it onto people’s must-read summer reading lists. But the financial calamities of last autumn put the global economy on the brink of disaster and led to continuing fiscal woes. Understanding what happened has become vitally important not just for bankers and economists, but for everyone affected by the fallout, which means... well, just about everyone. For all of us then, David Wessel’s new book “In Fed We Trust” is essential, lucid — and, it turns out, riveting — reading. In these pages Mr. Wessel, the economics editor of The Wall Street Journal, chronicles how the Fed chairman Ben S. Bernanke, with Henry M. Paulson Jr., then the Treasury secretary, and a small group of associates, frantically worked to shore up the United States economy, capturing how this handful of people — “overwhelmed, exhausted, beseeched, besieged, constantly second-guessed” — tried to catch and stabilize one toppling fiscal domino after the next….His overall assessment: “Every time officials at the Treasury or the Fed thought they finally had gotten ahead of the Great Panic, they turned out to be insufficiently pessimistic. This would be a distinguishing characteristic of this chapter in American economic history: even when officials thought they were planning for the worst-case scenario, they weren’t.”

7/21/09