Ben Bernanke
Ben Bernanke
Ben Shalom Bernankeis an American economist at the Brookings Institution who served two terms as chairman of the Federal Reserve, the central bank of the United States, from 2006 to 2014. During his tenure as chairman, Bernanke oversaw the Federal Reserve's response to the late-2000s financial crisis. Before becoming Federal Reserve chairman, 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...
NationalityAmerican
ProfessionPolitician
Date of Birth13 December 1953
CityAugusta, GA
CountryUnited States of America
There's no magical relationship between inverted yield curves and recession. There's a debate why long-term rates are so low. It's partly a low term premium and a lot of saving looking for a relatively limited number of investments.
As you know, in the latter part of 2008 and early 2009, the Federal Reserve took extraordinary steps to provide liquidity and support credit market functioning, including the establishment of a number of emergency lending facilities and the creation or extension of currency swap agreements with 14 central banks around the world.
Because a person has to be either working or looking for work to be counted as part of the labor force, an increase in the number of people too discouraged to continue their search for work would reduce the unemployment rate, all else being equal - but not for a positive reason.
Neighborhoods and communities are complex organisms that will be resilient only if they are healthy along a number of interrelated dimensions, much as a human body cannot be healthy without adequate air, water, rest, and food.
There's going to be a big impact there for a number of weeks. It's big enough to show up in the national statistics.
It's been a resilient economy, it's responded well and job creation has proceeded apace.
I think it's generally a bad idea for the Fed to be the arbiter of asset prices. The Fed doesn't really have any better information than other people in the market about what the correct value of asset prices is.
Interest rates are used to achieve overall economic stability.
Roger made invaluable contributions to the Federal Reserve and to the country.
These are issues that we are going to have to address, because they are significant.
The Fed's policy choices can always be debated, but the quality and commitment of the Federal Reserve as a public institution is second to none, and I am proud to lead it.
Indeed, I would argue that, in situations of considerable slack, growth that is generated solely by increased productivity, and that is unaccompanied by substantial employment growth, may possibly require monetary ease, rather than monetary tightening, in the short run.
I think at this point in time that the inverted yield curve is not signaling a slowdown.
might have done much more harm than good.