I don't think Bernanke sounded too confident this morning before Congress "The job market is far from normal," and "The decline in the unemployment rate over the past year has been somewhat more rapid than might have been expected."
(Of course Ron Paul was there to break into his usual rhetoric, brandishing a silver eagle, telling Bernanke that "the record of what you've done is destroy the currency." which Bernak replied with the ole "I'd like to discuss this with you later in private." )
All in all, the talks sent the dollar rising but the financial market and the gold value falling as the chairman hinted at NO need for QE3 and a possible rise in interest rates.
Of course if you ask me interest rates should have been raised well over a year ago. It is pretty pathetic when the Canadian dollar is worth what the US Dollar is, and we need to hike interest rates sky high and remove our dollar from a sub par status. A strong dollar is key if we are to experience any true recovery IMO.
And lest we not forget that while the federal funds rate is stuck at 0% indefinitely due to the volume of debt that has been accumulated by households, businesses and government over the past 30 years. (It was almost 5% in 2008.) Even a 50 basis point increase in the funds rate would collapse home prices and cause the debt servicing cost of the government to surge.
The United States is on excessively low interest rate life support and is fundamentally broken from an economic and financial standpoint. Zero interest rates DESTROYS the risk barometer because how can you gauge risk with 0% interest rates? Bernanke knows this, but he cannot come out and say it because the DOW would drop 1000 points in 10 minutes if he did.
He's basically reduced to using the job market as a scapegoat to justify the Fed's monetary policy when the real reasons for it are much broader in scope.
I say get rid of Bernanke just like you wanted to when you took office, O....