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
Equally important, stable prices allow people to rely on the dollar as a measure of value when making long-term contracts, engaging in long-term planning or lending for long periods.
At this point, a leveling out or a modest softening of housing activity seems more likely than a sharp contraction, although significant uncertainty attends the outlook for home prices and construction.
Since World War II, inflation - the apparently inexorable rise in the prices of goods and services - has been the bane of central bankers.
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.
Those high oil prices are a burden on U.S. families, on firms' production costs. But the good news is that at least so far the U.S. economy has not been slowed by the high energy prices.
Unfortunately there's nothing, really, that can be done that's going to affect energy prices or gasoline prices in the very short run.
A collapse in U.S. stock prices certainly would cause a lot of white knuckles on Wall Street.
I think it's generally a bad idea for the Fed to be the arbiter of asset prices. The Fed doesn't really have any better information than other people in the market about what the correct value of asset prices is.
High energy prices are burdening household budgets and raising production costs, and continued increases would at some point restrain economic growth.
A further jump in energy prices or a more pronounced reaction to those increases in prices that have already occurred could test the strength of the expansion,
I do think there is some chance we will see increased private sector savings in the next year or two if housing prices were to moderate.
The high energy prices are certainly burdening consumer budgets, they are burdening cost structures of firms and certainly continued increases in energy prices are a risk for economic growth going forward.
The inflation objective is explicitly a long-term or medium term objective. It focuses on, for example, core inflation to avoid getting involved in short-term fluctuations in energy prices and the like.
These inflation effects should fade even if energy prices remain elevated, so long as monetary policy keeps inflation expectations well-anchored.