“With Bold Steps, Fed Chief Quiets Some Criticism”:
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“It has been a really head-spinning range of unprecedented and bold actions,” said Charles W. Calomiris, professor of finance and economics at Columbia Business School, referring to the Fed’s lending activities. “That is exactly as it should be. But I’m not saying that it’s without some cost and without some risk.”
[As yours truly noted back in November, Charles Calomiris wrote a verbose and obtuse article for VoxEU which proclaimed that there was no credit crisis -- a restatement of his August claim that there was no credit crisis. I guess that makes him almost as good a forecaster as Bernanke is. ]
Timothy F. Geithner, president of the Federal Reserve Bank of New York, and a close Bernanke ally, defines the Fed chief’s “doctrine” as the overpowering use of monetary policies and lending to avert an economic collapse. “Ben has, in very consequential ways, altered the framework for how central banks operate in crises,” he said. “Some will criticize it and some will praise it, and it will certainly be examined for decades.”
Mr. Bernanke’s actions have transformed his image as a self-effacing former economics professor.
“I am tempted to think of him as somewhat Buddha-like,” said Richard W. Fisher, president of the Dallas Federal Reserve Bank. “He’s developed a serenity based on a growing understanding of the hardball ways the system actually works. You can see that it’s no longer an academic or theoretical exercise for him.”
Did he just say “Buddha-like”?
Within the Bush administration, Mr. Bernanke’s willingness to work with Democrats in Congress on measures to prevent mortgage foreclosures has stirred unease. “The fact that he, an appointee of George Bush, has come very close to advocating — though he hasn’t quite advocated it — a piece of legislation that George Bush threatened to veto is an illustration of his willingness to put his head on the chopping block,” said Alan S. Blinder, a professor of economics at Princeton and friend of the Fed chief.
One reason Mr. Bernanke is sticking his neck out is that he believes the broader economy’s recovery depends on the housing sector, which remains in a serious slump. Plenty of new evidence surfaced on Tuesday that this year’s spring home-buying season will be dismal, with one report showing that prices fell 14.1 percent in March from a year earlier and another that new-home sales are down 42 percent over the last year.
Among Democrats, Mr. Bernanke, a Republican, had previously been criticized by such party luminaries as the two former Clinton administration Treasury secretaries, Robert E. Rubin and Lawrence E. Summers, who worried that he was downplaying the dangers of a recession. But that view has changed.
“I think in the last few months they’ve handled themselves very sure-footedly,” Mr. Rubin said of the Fed. Many Democrats in Congress agree.
“They say that crisis makes the man,” said Senator Charles E. Schumer, Democrat of New York and the chairman of the Joint Economic Committee. “He’s made believers out of people who were just not sure about him before.”
To lessen the chances of a financial collapse, Mr. Bernanke engineered the takeover of one investment bank, Bear Stearns, and tossed credit lifelines to others with exotic new lending facilities — the Fed now has seven such lending windows, some of them for investment banks as well as commercial banks.
He also allowed the Fed to accept assets of debatable value — mortgage-backed securities, car loans and credit card debt — as collateral for some Fed loans. For the first time ever, he installed Fed regulators inside investment banks to inspect their books.
Much to the dismay of conservative economists, Mr. Bernanke has also presided over an extraordinarily aggressive series of interest rate cuts, lowering the fed funds rate seven times, to 2 percent from 5.75 percent, since last September, though it has signaled a pause in further rate-cutting barring a further crisis. …
Bernanke and Paulson are the worst thing that’s happened to capitalism since Arthur Burns and Richard Nixon. Carter would have been awful, but conditions were so bad by 1979 that he had to authorize significant deregulation and capital gains tax cuts (from 35% to 28%, from memory) kicking and screaming.
