In a short-term sense, you’re right, A. From the business end, the Fed is pretty agnostic at this point.

In the long term – as in, from its inception? It was (I’ll avoid “liberal/conservtative”) a interventionist strategy. I believe a close derivative of one of Katie’s points is that this intervention has had severe, “unintended” consequences on the market. For one thing, it’s built a couple of huge fiscal chokepoints that make the entire economy vulnerable to distortions, accidental or otherwise.

We could go into which party is more prone to intervention, but that’d really just cloud the discussion, wouldn’t it?

Your logic on this really confounds me. If Wall Street tries to maximize their wealth under a system de-regulated by folks like GOPer Phil Gramm, they are merely trying to get a competitive advantage. (I mean, even one your commenter’s favorite crack-pot Austrian School orgs blames Gramm.)

People don’t suddenly become corrupt when they maximize wealth under what’s legal. There may be a moral claim that they’ve done wrong, but they won’t go to prison. However, when GOPers and Clinton got together to deregulate the financial sector, they were corrupt. They set up a system where incentives put money in too-risky situation w/o any moral hazard to CEOs, hid derivatives trading from the market, etc

This sort of stuff was fully supported by Greenspan, Bernanke, etc. All these folks shuffle in and out of investment banks — both supposedly “corrupt” and not — setting up laws and regulations that benefit the investment banks over the broader economy. Even when we needed a bailout to fix the economy, we still didn’t get anything to prevent this in the future.

This post (among others) strains to throw everyone into “liberal” and “conservative” camps. This is one example where such distinctions make absolutely no sense. No one at the Fed, nor their buddies at investment banks, cares about such things — they just want to line each others’ pockets. Making the Fed, an entity somewhat separate from the Obama administration, into a bunch of evil liberals conspirators makes no sense. It’s more likely they’re all looking out for one another’s power and wealth.

Bush appointed Bernanke the first time around, and Obama is the one who is keeping him here since he’s proven that he will worship at the alter of the government and dismiss the voice of the people. If by “Wall Street-loving,” “aguy” is referring to the corrupt and failing firms that Bernanke helped bail out with taxpayer money, he should use a different term. Not every firm or bank on Wall Street is a corrupt failure – in fact, the stock market seems to be the only place – other than gold – that people can put money right now since banks won’t lend: Bernanke’s Fed has imposed such strict regulations that nothing is happening. Gosh, Bernanke just LOVES banks, doesn’t he? Nope. Far from “favoring” banks, he’s just an Administration brown-noser.