"Ben Bernanke’s 50 basis point cuts in the Fed funds and discount rates this week may go down as the most irresponsible move in Fed history"

Peter Schiff nails Bernanke's move to the wall.

History will not be kind. Bernanke has destroyed the US dollar, and made a bad situation worse. Think mortgage rates were too high? Wait until burned foreigners start selling their US bonds, driving up interest rates even higher. Think inflation is tame? Wait until those imports you're addicted to soar in price as the dollar tanks.

When the Fed should have been raising, they lowered.

And now we're fu*cked. Here's Schiff:

Helicopter Ben Earns His Wings

Coming at a time when rate increases were needed to combat the sinking dollar and surging gold, oil and other commodity prices, Ben Bernanke’s 50 basis point cuts in the Fed funds and discount rates this week may go down as the most irresponsible move in Fed history.

To America’s creditors around the world, whose mountains of dollar reserves will be debased by lower rates in the U.S., this action amounts to the monetary equivalent of “let them eat cake.” My prediction is that rather than doing so, they will just throw it back in our faces, and refuse to continue funding our deficits.

Furthermore, a fifty basis point cut was not an act of bravery but one of cowardice. The brave thing to do would have been to raise rates and allow market forces to purge the economy of the imbalances built up during the Greenspan bubbles. It would have taken some real courage to level with the American public and let them know that our profligacy has consequences, rather than pretending it can ride to the rescue with a wave of its magic wand and a crank of the printing press.