Ben Bernanke Quotes
The Depression was an incredibly dramatic episode - an era of stock-market crashes, breadlines, bank runs and wild currency speculation, with the storm clouds of war gathering ominously in the background... For my money, few periods are so replete with human interest.
Bernanke, Ben S. Essays on the Great Depression. Princeton University Press, 2000, p. 5.
When he wrote this article, America was in the middle of the Great Depression. In its first 3 years, President Herbert Hoover, a great believer in private charity, was so rigid in his ideology, that he refused to allow the Federal Government to provide some relief to the vast number of people in need who had overwhelmed the capacity of private charities. At the same time, the more affluent whose generosity funded the charities, had seen their own fortunes slashed by the depression and the themselves were often failing. When Franklin Delano Roosevelt was elected, he was much more flexible and when Flexner was writing this article, the Federal Government was performing many functions that before were only provided by private organizations.
Born thought that her agency was responsible for regulating the new esoteric financial products—derivatives including credit default swaps—for otherwise there would be no regulation at all of financial products that could dwarf the stock and bond market. Summers persuaded her to back off. When the Meltdown of 2008 hit, the huge derivative exposure of the large banks and some insurance companies was so great that it was one of the major causes for the meltdown of the entire banking system. Summers, normally a great economist not only called this one wrong, but later, along with most other government and private economists ignored a very explicit warning—See {637168}, {637986}, and {620038}.
Ben Shalom Bernanke is an American economist at the Brookings Institution who served two terms as the 14th Chair of the Federal Reserve, from 2006 to 2014. During his tenure as chair, Bernanke oversaw the Federal Reserve's response to the late-2000s financial crisis, for which he was named the 2009 Time Person of the Year. Before becoming Federal Reserve chair, 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.
