Ben Bernanke
Ben Bernanke
Ben Shalom Bernankeis an American economist at the Brookings Institution who served two terms as chairman of the Federal Reserve, the central bank of the United States, from 2006 to 2014. During his tenure as chairman, Bernanke oversaw the Federal Reserve's response to the late-2000s financial crisis. Before becoming Federal Reserve chairman, Bernanke was a tenured professor at Princeton University and chaired the department of economics there from 1996 to September 2002, when he went on public service leave...
NationalityAmerican
ProfessionPolitician
Date of Birth13 December 1953
CityAugusta, GA
CountryUnited States of America
In September 2008, the two largest housing mortgage companies called Fannie Mae and Freddie Mac, which were government-sponsored enterprises, which hold hundreds of billions of dollars of mortgages, because of the losses they took on the mortgages, they essentially became insolvent, and the government had to take them over.
Because a person has to be either working or looking for work to be counted as part of the labor force, an increase in the number of people too discouraged to continue their search for work would reduce the unemployment rate, all else being equal - but not for a positive reason.
Certainly there is no way to direct the effects of monetary policy at a single class of assets while leaving other financial markets and the broader economy untouched. One might as well try to perform brain surgery with a sledgehammer.
By not tying policy to a small set of forecast indicators, we may sacrifice some degree of simplicity, but we are less likely to be misled when a favored variable behaves in an unusual manner.
In the future, financial firms of any type whose failure would pose a systemic risk must accept especially close regulatory scrutiny of their risk-taking.
I don't think that Chinese ownership of U.S. assets is so large as to put our country at risk economically.
There is a deficit; I'd like to see it lowered. But it's up to Congress to decide whether that should be done by higher taxes, lower spending or some combination.
We're much more data-driven. We need to continually re-evaluate our forecasts and think about the prospects for the economy and make our decisions based on what the information is that's coming into our hands.
To say that the U.S. economy benefits from trade is not to say that every individual American worker or family benefits, or that the structural changes induced by trade are not disruptive,
to return to levels consistent with price stability in coming quarters.
When prices are stable, people can hold money for transactions and other purposes without having to worry that inflation will eat away at the real value of their money balances.
To the extent that bank panics interfere with normal flows of credit, they may affect the performance of the real economy.
Of course, economic forecasts must be revised when new information arrives and are thus necessarily provisional.
Low and stable inflation in many countries is an important accomplishment that will continue to bring significant benefits.