Word: feds
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Dates: during 2000-2009
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...discussing a financial crisis with a trusted expert and industry leader. A mention in a call log is not the same as an actual conversation, Blankfein correctly points out. He recalls only a handful of actual conversations with Paulson or Timothy Geithner, then the president of the New York Fed. "Now, that was AIG week," he says, "but it was also breaking the buck on [money-market firm] First Reserve week, and it was the week when Lehman's bankruptcy caused huge problems in the prime brokerage system in London. There were a million things that I would have been...
...before the collapses of Bear Stearns and Merrill Lynch, Fannie and Freddie, Lehman Brothers, AIG and WaMu, before Bernanke called upon decades of historical study to start dispensing money to banks and then quasi-banks and then companies that weren't banks at all. In his insider account In Fed We Trust: Ben Bernanke's War on the Great Panic, David Wessel details how Bernanke essentially turned himself into a fourth branch of government, exploiting a loophole in a 1932 law that gave the Fed wide latitude in "unusual and exigent circumstances" to become a virtual economic commander in chief...
...shown a flair for politics and p.r., doing a memorable 60 Minutes interview at the height of the crisis, providing an important vote of confidence for Obama's stimulus package and getting the theater as well as the substance right at several key congressional hearings. (Read "Bernanke Defends Fed's Actions Before Congress...
...That said, there's something a bit creepy about the megapower that's accumulating at the Fed, one of Washington's least accountable institutions. Why should the markets decide who oversees them? Haven't the markets decided enough? Bernanke may be the ideal benevolent financial despot - a nebbishy superscholar with minimal connections to Wall Street and no previous hunger for power - but the next Fed chairman may be less ideal. And Obama has proposed to give even more regulatory power to the Fed, even though it has shown little interest in the past in curbing the excesses of the markets...
...Fed chairman is often described as the second most powerful U.S. official; the main check on him is the first most powerful official's power not to reappoint him. That power won't be used this year, and it's easy to see why. But someday, a President may have to use it - no matter what the markets...