James Grants: "life behind bars" for Bernanke

James Grant, the editor of Grant's Interest Rate Observer, has published a long article on the Wall Street Journal where he advocates a return to the gold standard and also kind of lean toward requesting putting the Ben Bernanke, the mad scientist, behind bar for the rest of his life.

The article is an interesting read, summarizing very quickly the monetary history of the 20th century and why the mess we are in is unlikely to go away as long as Central Banks are debasing the currency, preventing and destroying savings and forcing credit.

Here are the first and last paragraphs of the article:

Ben S. Bernanke doesn't know how lucky he is. Tongue-lashings from Bernie Sanders, the populist senator from Vermont, are one thing. The hangman's noose is another. Section 19 of this country's founding monetary legislation, the Coinage Act of 1792, prescribed the death penalty for any official who fraudulently debased the people's money. Was the massive printing of dollar bills to lift Wall Street (and the rest of us, too) off the rocks last year a kind of fraud? If the U.S. Senate so determines, it may send Mr. Bernanke back home to Princeton. But not even Ron Paul, the Texas Republican sponsor of a bill to subject the Fed to periodic congressional audits, is calling for the Federal Reserve chairman's head.
[...]
Get the Fed out of the price-fixing business. Replace Ben Bernanke with a latter-day Thomson Hankey. Find—cultivate—battalions of latter-day Hellmans and set them to running free-market banks. There's one more thing: Return to the statute books Section 19 of the 1792 Coinage Act, but substitute life behind bars for the death penalty. It's the 21st century, you know.