The Federal Reserve did not only vow to maintain a zero interest-rate policy through the end of 2014 (a policy that has its critics, incidentally). They also set an explicit interest rate target for the first time ever, as far as I can tell.

A stunning new GAO report prompted by Bernie Sanders shows there’s not much distance between the big financial institutions on Wall Street and the Federal Reserve system, particularly when it comes to the directors of the regional banks GAO found multiple Regional Bank directors with direct conflicts of interests.

Economists at Goldman Sachs now put the odds of the United States officially slipping back into recession at roughly 40 percent. They also forecast that even without a technical recession, stalled growth could force unemployment to rise in 2012. It is extremely hard to imagine how Obama could win in 2012 if the unemployment crisis actually gets worse as we get closer to November.

In a rare attempt to intervene in the policymaking of an independent agency, the four top Republicans in the House and Senate wrote a letter to Federal Reserve Chair Ben Bernanke, warning him against further steps to use monetary policy to boost the struggling US economy.

Thoughts turn to monetary policy, and yesterday we saw at least some movement toward some action on that front. In addition to Charles Evans of the Chicago Fed talking unusually rationally about the crisis of high unemployment, Ben Bernanke hinted at more steps.

Bernanke can’t understand why consumers aren’t acting in accordance with his understanding of rationality. Mary Schapiro and Robert Khuzami of the SEC don’t punish people for securities fraud. They all should look to the past for help understanding how to do their jobs.

The Fed can’t help you. The Obama Administration doesn’t even feel your pain. The Congress hates you. But, it’s your fault if you can’t get to the sunny side of the street to join their only real constituents.

I’ve found one of the saddest yet most common defenses of President Obama’s handling of his job to be the weird argument that it simply wasn’t possible for him to do a better job, or to do anything different from what he did. It always reminds me of the mantra of the misguided extreme optimist Dr. Pangloss in Candide, “all is for the best in the best of all possible worlds.”

Ezra Klein is up with another post defending Obama with this same basic argument.

I’m not sure if this is information we already knew from the Fed audit, or an additional set of data, or maybe just the specifics that came out of that Bloomberg FOIA request. At any rate, Bloomberg has presented it in a very direct manner with a very provocative title: “Wall Street Aristocracy Got $1.2 Trillion in Secret Fed Loans.” I think some activist snuck into the Bloomberg offices and wrote this report.

In short, there is no deficit that cannot be plugged except for our political deficit. It sustains the defeatism of years of no growth, stagnant wages, high unemployment. The political tendency toward right-wing and corporatist policy ideas over the past 30 years, tied up with the cost of running campaigns, the failure of traditional media, the conservative movement’s public relations machinery, has widened that political deficit between what government can provide and what it will provide.