One current and three former members of the American branch of The Committee to Destroy the World – otherwise known as the Federal Reserve – met last week in a public forum to discuss their work.

What I learned is this: Central bankers’ wholesale destruction of capital will not only continue, but in fact accelerate in the weeks and months ahead.

Here’s what the Fed said, and why I’m not at all happy with it…

“Helicopter Ben” Makes a Return Appearance

The epitome of the cluelessness and arrogance that reigns in the halls of the Marriner S. Eccles Building in Washington, D.C. was without question the comments by former Fed Chairman Ben Bernanke bragging about all of the money that the Fed had earned in its QE program that was sent over to the U.S. Treasury. (Among other things, he neglected to mention that the end of QE means that these funds will no longer be available to reduce the U.S. budget deficit, which is going to explode over the next few years.)

Mr. Bernanke was the architect of the brilliant plan to push investors to take greater risks by reducing nominal interest rates to zero and real (inflation-adjusted) rates to below zero.

This policy left the United States buried in debt that suffocates economic growth, widens wealth inequality, and sets the country on course for another crisis.

Conditions are even worse in Europe, Japan and China where their central banks enthusiastically copied Mr. Bernanke’s prescription for “growth.”

The world would have been better off had Dr. Kervorkian been in charge.

A close friend of mine, who is also a legendary hedge fund manager, keeps saying that the stock market is not going to rise if interest rates stay low because low rates mean that the economy is weak.

He is focused on the 10-year Treasury yield, which finished last week well below 2% at 1.72%.

But the fact that this yield dwarfs those in much of the rest of the world, where interest rates going out as far as 10 years are negative in Japan and parts of Europe and approaching zero in Europe’s strongest economy, Germany (0.10%), is a frightening proposition.