"If this guy prints more money between now and the election, I dunno what y'all would do to him in Iowa, but we would treat him pretty ugly down in Texas."
Bank of Japan Gov. Haruhiko Kuroda pulls a face at a press conference on Oct. 7 at the central bank's headquaters in Tokyo.
Such were the words of Texas Gov. and Republican presidential hopeful Rick Perry, speaking in Iowa, in August 2011. The "guy" he mentioned was U.S. Federal Reserve Chairman Ben Bernanke, whose policy of quantitative easing, Perry went on to describe, as "almost treasonous." If the Texan's words seemed to come from an old-school Hollywood western, so did the response of Bernanke. Evidently aware that "a man's gotta do what a man's gotta do," as the actor John Wayne is said to have put it, he journeyed to El Paso, in deepest Texas, and explained the purpose of monetary policy to soldiers at Fort Bliss.