While I found it useful to have all the major decisions presented in a clear timeline, I don't really know what I think of Bernanke. He seems like a very smart, very decent man who either is unconcerned about conservative economic ideology or utterly enthralled by it. For someone so smart, he seems so wrong about so many things. (That is basically what good-old Dean Baker from the Center for Economic and Policy Research says in the article.)
Anyway, I'll leave people to make up their own minds, but I will share one disturbing anecdote from the article. I think it encapsulates how our country has been run for the last eight years:
In June, 2005, Bernanke was sworn in [as the chair of the Council of Economic Advisors] at the Eisenhower Executive Office Building. One of his first tasks was to deliver a monthly economics briefing to the President and the Vice-President. After he and [Al] Hubbard sat down in the Oval Office, President Bush noticed that Bernanke was wearing light-tan socks under his dark suit. “Where did you get those socks, Ben?” he asked. “They don’t match.” Bernanke didn’t falter. “I bought them at the Gap—three pairs for seven dollars,” he replied. During the briefing, which lasted about forty-five minutes, the President mentioned the socks several times.
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Just finished that article which is very long but gives a good peak at what's going on behind the scenes. The crucial passage in the article, at least in terms of evaluating Bernanke's performance, is the part about the reaction to the impending Lehman Bros failure. If you believe that Bernanke had no realistic options to assist in getting another company to acquire them (a la the JP Morgan / Bear Stearns deal) then Bernanke comes out looking rough around the edges but altogether ok. If you don't believe that, as Dean Baker doesn't (his line of argument basically being that though the Fed had legal restrictions in the lengths it could take to save Lehman, no one was going to call the Fed out on that) then Bernanke looks more like a man frantically pulling levers hoping to stumble on the right one or combination of ones that will put an end to the catastrophe.
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