Time: 'Why Obama Appointed Bernanke to a New Fed Term'

[Jackeens]

By MICHAEL GRUNWALD Tuesday, Aug. 25, 2009

Before Ben Bernanke was chairman of the U.S. Federal Reserve, he was an ivory-tower economist who trained at Harvard and MIT, taught at Stanford and Princeton and may have learned more about the Great Depression than anyone else on the planet. One thing he knew was that he never wanted to see another one.

So 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 Ben to a second term on Tuesday. Bernanke was at the President's side when he made the announcement and heard Obama say that Bernanke had "led the Fed through one of the worst financial crises that this nation and this world have ever faced."

Bernanke's is in many ways an inspiring story, a financial overlord from Main Street rather than Wall Street, from the faculty lounge rather than the corridors of power, from the realm of pragmatism and analysis rather than partisanship and ideology. He was a nice Jewish boy from small-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.

More: http://www.time.com/time/politics/article/0,8599,1918422,00.html?iid=tsmodule

[Clio the Leo]

1. Oh good.......... (superficial post to follow, not for the faint of heart)

..... I thought you had TOTALLY missed the no tie, open collar shots .......... which are my weakness.

....... and pulling us back from the brink of a financial apocolypse ...... which is also hot.