Bernanke Says Low Rates Didn’t Cause Housing Bubble

[Joanne98]

Source: Bloomberg


Jan. 3 (Bloomberg) -- Federal Reserve Chairman Ben S. Bernanke said the central bank’s low interest rates didn’t cause the past decade’s housing bubble and that better regulation would have been more effective in limiting the boom.

“The best response to the housing bubble would have been regulatory, rather than monetary,” Bernanke said today in remarks to the American Economic Association’s annual meeting in Atlanta. The Fed’s efforts to constrain the bubble were “too late or were insufficient,” which means that regulatory actions “must be better and smarter,” he said.

Bernanke said the Fed is working to improve its supervision of banks and has strengthened measures to protect consumers of mortgages and other financial products. Senate Banking Committee Chairman Christopher Dodd, who backs Bernanke for a second term, has called the Fed’s oversight of banks leading up to the crisis an “abysmal failure.” Dodd proposes stripping the Fed and other agencies of bank supervision powers and moving them to a new regulator.

Scholars such as Allan Meltzer, a historian of the central bank, have criticized the Fed for helping fuel the housing boom by keeping interest rates too low for too long. The bursting of the housing bubble led to the worst recession since the Great Depression and the loss of more than 7 million U.S. jobs.


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