It was heartening to hear Mr. Ben Bernanke testifying that he thinks the recession is bottoming out and he hopes, with a few caveats, that recovery will start towards the end of this year. With respect to Mr. Bernanke, who obviously knows vastly more than me, I still doubt he knows what he is talking about. This entire crisis was brought about by record low interest rates started by his predecessor, Mr. Greenspan, and continued by him. Not only that he allowed the Bush administration to cut taxes and thus add to the already huge liquidity. He has been presiding over massive spending by the present administration increasing deficit to over one trillion dollars. Can he swear that he will be able to reduce money supply if inflation starts to take off? What will he do if the dollar were to fall by, say, 50%? If recovery indeed takes off it will again put upward pressure on commodity prices. Oil has jumped to over $ 54 already. What will he do if oil goes to above $ 100 and chokes off any nascent recovery? If the US starts to recover and customers start buying again it will only increase fiscal deficit by sucking in imports. The East Asian crisis, the dot com crisis and now the subprime one, not one of the hotshot economists foresaw them coming. Why should we believe they have the treatment when they cannot diagnose. We may yet have a Mugabe-syndrome crisis wherein currencies become toilet paper and toilet paper costs in millions. Mugabe will enjoy that. Scary.