4/2/2023 0 Comments Mac gapplin use for![]() Written on a 3-by-5 card and placed next to his computer screen, it began, "If I were to try to read, much less answer all the attacks made on me, this shop might as well be closed for any other business." During his darker days during the economic crisis, Bernanke found solace in a quotation from Abraham Lincoln given to him by the Fed's parking garage manager. As a graduate student in economics at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology, Bernanke met his wife, Anna, on a blind date - a spaghetti dinner followed by pingpong - after being introduced by friends who felt they were both "nerdy." Interested in math, he realized he couldn't compete with Harvard's top students and made a "last-minute decision" to take an introductory economics class taught by Martin Feldstein. Accepted to Harvard, he felt academically unprepared and failed his first physics midterm. The real prejudice in town, he says, was directed at African Americans. Several times, he writes, elementary school classmates asked "quite innocently, I believe" whether he had horns. Growing up in Dillon, the son of the town's druggist, Bernanke describes himself as "bookish and shy and often on my own." As a Jew, Bernanke said he was something of an outsider. The book, tracing Bernanke's life from his small-town roots in Dillon, South Carolina, to Harvard and Princeton universities to chairman of the Fed, reveals: "But most of my colleagues and I were determined not to repeat the blunder the Federal Reserve had committed in the 1930s when it refused to deploy its monetary tools to avoid the sharp deflation that substantially worsened the Great Depression."īernanke says the Fed's key goals were to lower interest rates to help the economy, unfreeze credit in the banking system, rescue major financial firms and conduct "stress tests" of the biggest banks to reassure investors. ![]() "The journey was nerve-wracking," he writes. It also launched a bond-buying program to try to drive down long-term borrowing rates.īernanke argues that without the government's extraordinary assistance, the Great Recession, as severe as it was, would have been worse. Late in 2008, the Fed cut its key short-term rate to a record low near zero, where it remains today, to support the economy. ![]() He would wince, he said, when he saw bumper stickers saying, "Where's my bailout?"īut the book amounts to a defense of the bailouts and the Fed's rescue program for the economy. He notes that the taxpayer-provided bailouts were widely unpopular. ![]()
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