John Maynard Keynes, Fabian socialist and the godfather of modern day economic planning, in his 1935 work, The General Theory of Employment, Interest and Money, wrote:

"Practical men, who believe themselves to be quite exempt from any intellectual influence, are usually the slaves of some defunct economist."

In late November 2008, then Federal Reserve Chairman Ben Bernanke committed a fait accompli.  Though he may not have realized it at the time; he was blinded by his scholarly prejudices.

Bernanke, a smug Great Depression history buff of the highest academic pedigree, gazed back 80-years, observed several credit market parallels, and then made a preconceived diagnosis.

After that, he picked up his desktop copy of A Monetary History of the United States, by Milton Friedman and Anna Schwartrz, turned to the chapter on the Great Depression, and got to work inflating the money supply.

Bernanke first let the quantitative easing (QE) genie out of the bottle with the purchase of $600 billion in mortgage-backed securities and Treasury notes.  He bought them with digital monetary credits created out of thin air.

By March 2009, Bernanke had run up the Fed's balance sheet from $900 billion to $1.75 trillion.  Then, over the next five years, he ballooned it out to $4.5 trillion.  All the while, he flattered his ego with platitudes that he was preventing Great Depression Part Deux.