I was a student at Brigham Young University back in the early ’80s. They had a dress code rule for women that said that women couldn’t wear jeans, but could wear “feminine cut slacks out of denim material.” It was a policy that ended up being dropped, as no one had a clue what was the difference between womens jeans, and “feminine cut slacks.”

For the life of me, I fail to see the difference between ‘monetary policy’ and ‘financial innovation’- other than where one choses to lay the blame. Call it what they want, when our grandkids study this time period in history class, if the textbooks are honest, they are going to talk about the mistakes made by the Fed.

By the way, Reuters reported that “Federal Reserve Board Governor Frederic Mishkin said that monetary policy is not responsible for creating financial crises.”

(Mishkin:) “These crises that develop have nothing to do with ‘monetary policy’, but rather with financial innovation where markets sometimes make ‘mistakes’.”

Hmmmm… Maybe Cramer IS right in saying the Feds don’t have a clue. (-,