Word: feds
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...when the financial markets melted down in 2008, the mild-mannered, consensus-minded, professorial ex-professor vowed to avoid the errors of omission the sluggish Fed had made in the 1930s and do everything possible to prevent the crisis from becoming a calamity. He blasted a fire hose full of dollars at the U.S. economy, exercising unprecedented powers and sidestepping the democratic process, figuring that desperate times called for desperate measures. And while the blaze hasn't been extinguished, it's starting to look like it's under control, which is why President Barack Obama reappointed Fireman...
...town South Carolina who had pursued a career of scholarship; before George W. Bush appointed him to the Federal Reserve Board in 2002, his only brush with politics had been a stint on his local school board. Before the markets went haywire, he was building a reputation at the Fed as a collegial and unassuming technocrat who had none of the cult of personality that had swirled around Alan Greenspan - and he actually tried to make himself understood...
...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...