Bernanke's 21 Month U-Turn

Caroline Baum

From Bloomberg - by Caroline Baum He probably wishes he hadn’t said it, the part about the Federal Reserve not printing money and his 100 percent confidence in his ability to raise interest rates at the appropriate time to prevent an acceleration of inflation. But he did. The Fed does (print money). And nothing is 100 percent certain in this world, except death and taxes. So what on earth was Ben Bernanke thinking when he talked to Scott Pelley on CBS’s “60 Minutes” Sunday night? It was a different Bernanke than the one who sat down for an interview with the same correspondent on the same TV news magazine on March 15, 2009. That Bernanke was humble. Viewers responded positively to him.

Here was arguably the most powerful man in the world who hadn’t forgotten his small-town roots. A creature of neither Wall Street nor Washington, Bernanke inherited a financial system on the verge of collapse and, as he put it, he was forced to bail out Wall Street to save Main Street. Sunday’s Bernanke was different, defensive. He was responding to his critics, both domestic and foreign, who are opposed to the second round of quantitative easing as either unnecessary, a case of overreach or dollar-debasing and therefore inflationary. Read full column here:

Bernanke's 21 Month U-Turn