Jon Markman offers up more financial idiocy

After berating the Federal Reserve for “enabling” irresponsible investment bankers, he says the Fed and Big Ben Bernanke should have “gotten ahead of the curve” on rate cuts, by marking them down not 0.75 percent, not 1 percent, but a whole 1.25 percent.

That would certainly worsen the inflation he rightly decries. And, it wouldn’t do much more for greedy Wall Street bankers than the actual three-quarters point cut of today did do.

I agree that the Fed’s Board of Governors has been largely “outwitted and outplayed,” or, better yet, dimwitted and outplayed, but this would be to just play the Street’s game by its rules, only more so.

The Fed’s leaders, a dangerous mix of university professors and career bureaucrats, were drawn into a trap at amazing speed by dark forces in the global financing system that they now admit they scarcely understood.

So why does Markman think the Fed would do better with a larger rate cut?

Markman is usually pretty good in his financial comments, but sometimes he hits a huge clunker, such as predicting last May that the Dow would hit 21,000 in four years.

Today’s column may not be quite as stupid, but it’s up there.