Bernake is back, not making reassurances that things will be ok this time but sticking his neck out and saying that the U.S. is not in danger of inflation because of the weak dollar.

Seriously? It’s tough to feel confidence in this kind of declaration- it’s a weird feeling- it would have been tough to switch to another Fed chairman in the middle of all of this, to get someone else to learn all about what is going on and identify the problems, but it is just as tough to trust the word or the assessment of the guy who showed up and didn’t do anything to stop what was going on, right?

The AIG situation continues to be a teacher here- after allowing Lehman Brothers to go belly up, the government stepped in and rescued AIG, essentially guaranteeing all of their debts. And now, we have to pay them. At a cost of $182 billion, the government, meaning taxpayers, are paying off all the debts of AIG. And at a time when the employees are still doing deals and raking in bonuses, that is not the kind of thing that people are happy about.

And that was Bernake’s call- along with many of the other calls that have been made in dealing with the crisis- the crisis that folks are still unhappy about with unemployment soaring. And now Bernake is saying that the economy is doing so poorly that there will not be a problem with inflation.

It’s a leak- it’s not a statement he meant for the public to hear about. It is a letter that he wrote to Senator Jim Bunning (R) of Kentucky. He is up for Senate confirmation and it is an opinion I’m sure that he doesn’t want to be coming to light right now.

Bernake also said that there is no sign of a bubble in the U.S. stock marketing- which you have got to love, seeing as there is such a bubble that it would be no surprise if the dollar turns out to be made out of bubble gum and in twenty years we are all blowing bubbles that look like George Washington’s face.

I think the core takeaway here, though, is that no one can really trust what the financial people have to say about the economy. The last few years of moves have basically shown that they have no better idea about what to do with the economy than if a bunch of econ students from college were doing it as a project for their midterm. And I think that is the takeaway here- the economy is not a sure thing. It is not stable, and we have no more of a right to go back to “how it was” than we do to just settle down and deal with the fact that it is changing and that we may never get to where it was again- that may have been the mythic top of the mountain and now we will all fall and have to realize how to live when tumbling down the side of a steep, steep slope.

Or maybe not, if Bernake is right. And we better hope he is if he is going to get 4 more years.