Strike Three, Bernanke. You're out!

Federal Reserve Chairman Ben Bernanke was sweating it out against Representative Ron Paul's hardball questions on inflation during the recent meeting of the House Committee on Financial Services. While most of the committee members lobbed softballs at the Fed Charman, Dr. Paul hurled heat from the mound, forcing the characteristically coy Bernanke to display uncharacteristic moments of uneasiness, negative body language, and outright defensiveness.

Bernanke, for his part, should be losing composure in the face of heat from the mound. After all, Bernanke's beleaguered Fed, having accomplished next to nothing in regards to mitigating employment woes, the first of its official Dual Mandates, is on the cusp of failing its second mandate: keeping inflation under wraps.

How much inflation has Bernanke's "Crtl+P' monetary policy been generating? Well, according to the Commodity Price Index (not to be confused with the BLS's bogus Consumer Price Index), commodity prices in virtually every category have been on the path to overheating  since the introduction of QE1, ZIRP, and the Fed's secret $7.7 trillion bank bailout. However, nothing can provide a clearer depiction of Bernanke's legacy of inflation than a graphical comparison of the dwindling purchasing power of the Dollar and the rising price of oil:

(Click to enlarge chart. Data would look even uglier if extrapolated to Q2 2012.)
















Notice the near-perfect inverse correlation between the weakening Dollar and rising oil. Also, notice in the chart below that, if oil were priced in gold, you could buy a gallon of gas today for what you paid when Tom Seaver was a star pitcher! And that's even after Nixon took us off the gold standard in 1971!

(Click to enlarge chart.)

Sorry, Ben. Your astonishing disregard for flashing warning signs before the Financial Crisis was strike one. Your inability to promote employment was strike two. (Author's note: central banks don't create jobs, free markets do.) And now your promotion of inflation is strike three. You're out, Mr. Bernanke!