Bernanke doesn’t get enough credit for preventing a more serious economic meltdown.
Greenspan doesn’t get enough blame for the mess he “dumped” on Bernanke.
…as for Yellen, I am not exactly sure what she’s been doing.[/quote]
Bernanke gets plenty of credit for preventing a meltdown… that’s practically all I ever hear about him.
I don’t agree that he just passively had a mess “dumped” on him. He was with the Fed for a long time and was a major proponent of easy-money policy in the early 2000s. After he took over as Chairman (which was shortly before the bubble peaked), he repeatedly denied that there was a housing bubble, saying that home prices simply reflected positive economic fundamentals.
Thus, he was complicit in the last bubble. Then he went on to play a major role in stoking the next round of the bubble-and-bust, or at least “really overpriced assets-then-bust,” cycle. I’ll admit that the second statement is my opinion and the outcome remains to be seen. However, I think the state of asset valuations in the US is strongly supportive of it.
We’ll see, I guess. In the meantime, I find all the Bernanke hero-worship — which completely ignores the seemingly obvious role of the Fed in helping create these huge booms and busts — to be quite grating.
