Hacker News Reader

Comment by adjkant | Hacker News Reader

> The program, known as “Project Bernanke,”

Oof. You'd think people would learn by now that funny codenames for questionable projects never are a good idea...

Can someone explain for my sake what bernanke means in this context? He is a person but I'm not familiar with it's relation to this.

Ben Bernanke ran the Federal Reserve for a couple terms. So he controlled the US money system. When things get hard for the economy, like they did when he worked there around 2000, a solution is to "print money", which is basically the government deflating currency by creating more USD. Much like they're doing now with stimulus checks and "printing" trillions of dollars that didn't exist. It can keep the economy moving, but someone will eventually be footing that bill. So this project, called Bernanke, is kind of a joke name about how it's printing money at someone else's expense.

I mean if I were going to have a project that would allow me to print money by giving me an anti-competitive advantage I would make sure my project name steered clear of references to money printing or anti-competitive behavior.

I think I would have called it project AD-Efficient

And then if anyone ever complained about our project I would laugh a bit and say I never actually expected it to be so beneficial, that's why I made the project name sort of a joke, it ad efficient, but it's also a deficient - heh heh. I'd wear a cardigan and some granny glasses on the stand as I explained my little joke project. Anti-competitive me? Nobody who makes such a lame pun could ever be an evil genius!

Helicopter Ben is famous for printing money, this is Project Money Printer.

Or the project is so profitable it is like money is falling from from the sky.

Seriously, they might as well have called it "Project Helicopter Money."

Reply on news.ycombinator.com