My colleagues and I had to develop instant expertise – Ben Bernanke
Arthur Burns, Chair of the Federal Reserve from 1970 to 1978, publicly regretted afterward that he had lacked the spine to do what was necessary to get the Great Inflation of the 1970s under control. When his predecessor William McChesney Martin’s term ended in 1970, he openly declared, “I’ve been a failure.”
What are the regrets, if any, that weigh on Ben Bernanke’s memory when he looks back on his time as Fed Chair from 2006 until 2014? After a reading of his latest book 21st Century Monetary Policy I would say that -- at this time -- his most notable regret, one made repeatedly, is that he hadn’t made his experimental monetary operations even larger.
