Senator Jim Bunning, former Phillies pitcher, is a guy I previously didn’t even know was in elected office. I know now.

Reportedly he has spoken his mind to none other than Federal Reserve Board Chairman Ben Bernanke at Big Ben’s appearance on the Hill recently:

“Thank you, Mr. Chairman. I know we have a lot of ground to cover today, but I want to say a few things on the topic of this hearing and of the next.

“First, on monetary policy, I am deeply concerned about what the Fed has done in the last year and in the last decade. Chairman Greenspan’s easy money the late nineties and then following the tech bust inflated the housing bubble and created the mess we are in today. Chairman Bernanke’s easy money in the last year has undermined the dollar and sent oil to new record highs every few days, and almost doubling since the rate cuts started. Inflation is here and it is hurting average Americans.

“Second, the Fed is asking for more power. But the Fed has proven they cannot be trusted with the power they have. They get it wrong, do not use it, or stretch it further than it was ever supposed to go. As I said a moment ago, their monetary policy is a leading cause of the mess we are in. As regulators, it took them until yesterday to use power we gave them in 1994 to regulate all mortgage lenders. And they stretched their authority to buy 29 billion dollars of Bear Stearns assets so JPMorgan could buy Bear at a steep discount.

“Now the Fed wants to be the systemic risk regulator. But the Fed is the systemic risk. Giving the Fed more power is like giving the neighborhood kid who broke your window playing baseball in the street a bigger bat and thinking that will fix the problem. I am not going to go along with that and will use all my powers as a senator to stop any new powers going to the Fed. Instead, we should give them less to do, so they can do it right, either by taking away their monetary policy responsibility or by requiring them to focus only on inflation.”

I received this info second hand, but hopefully it is accurate.

If so, three cheer for Senator Bunning!

Thanks to David Galland at Casey Research for passing this along in his weekly missive “The Room”, a side benefit to all Casey Research subscribers.