Bernanke

President Obama did the right thing Tuesday when he reappointed Ben S. Bernanke as chairman of the Federal Reserve Board of Governors. The Fed made its share of mistakes during his first term, but its resourcefulness last fall helped to limit the damage caused by the credit market's collapse. Looking ahead, Bernanke's experience and scholarship seem well-suited to the challenges the central bank will face as the economy rebounds. Yet the Fed's track record also demonstrates why lawmakers should enact new rules for the financial industry to reduce the risk of another round of meltdowns and bailouts.

It's the monetary policy version of "Point/Counterpoint. " Leading Federal Reserve critic Peter Schiff will give his own lecture Thursday in Washington to counter a four-lecture series on the financial crisis by Fed Chairman Ben S. Bernanke that wraps up earlier in the day. Schiff, president of investment firm Euro Pacific Capital, will give his talk -- "The Fed Unspun: The Other Side of the Story" -- at the Reason Foundation, a free-market think...

President Obama said he released his long-form birth certificate to stop the conspiracy theories and keep the issue from distracting the nation from more important things. But in doing it Wednesday of all days when the issue has been simmering for months, two of his biggest critics, Sarah Palin and Glenn Beck, charged the White House with conspiring to create its own distraction -- from the first-ever news conference by Federal Reserve Chairman Ben S. Bernanke. That long-awaited event is also Wednesday.

Federal Reserve Chairman Ben S. Bernanke, worried that recent labor market improvements could fizzle because of weak economic growth, signaled that he was poised to keep interest rates at their super-low levels and stick with the central bank's easy-money policy for some time. Though the labor market and the economy have improved in recent months, he stressed in a speech Monday that labor-market conditions were "far from normal," noting that the number of people working is well below pre-recession levels, as is the total number of hours worked.

Federal Reserve Chairman Ben Bernanke's dour assessment of the U.S. recovery hit U.S. stocks Wednesday, as the Fed chief's comment on "unusually uncertain" economic prospects discouraged investors. Stocks sank after Bernanke acknowledged the labor market's continued weakness while offering few specific options to stimulate lending and investment. "The market sold off because unfortunately there is no remedy provided in Bernanke's commentary to the rising threat of deflation, the excess capacity in the economy and the malfunctioning of the credit system," said Joe Battipaglia, market strategist at Stifel Nicolaus in Yardley, Pennsylvania.

Federal Reserve Chairman Ben S. Bernanke said recent news articles about the central bank's emergency lending contain "egregious errors. " "The articles recycle information that has been disclosed to the Congress and the American people in various forms for some time," Bernanke said in letters to Senate Banking Committee Chairman Tim Johnson (D-S.D.) and the three other senior lawmakers who oversee the Fed. The Fed posted the letters and an accompanying four-page staff memo on its website Tuesday.

Federal Reserve Chairman Ben S. Bernanke didn't sway the markets much Tuesday with his cautious optimism about an economic recovery later this year, and he downright chilled U.S. workers with his prediction of "further sizable job losses" to come. In his most positive view of the economy since the financial crisis began, Bernanke told Congress that the deep recession was easing.

Wall Street rebounded from last week's declines after Federal Reserve Chairman Ben Bernanke said the central bank will continue to keep interest rates low even as the economy shows signs of recovering. Bernanke said during a speech that the Fed would support “continued accommodative policies” to help the economy grow more quickly. He hopes this stance will help create enough jobs to lower the unemployment rate even further. The comments sent major U.S. stock indexes up more than 1% through much of the session.

Federal Reserve Chairman Ben S. Bernanke, apparently seeking to mollify critics as he awaits Senate confirmation on his reappointment, said Tuesday that he welcomed a government audit of the central bank's role in the intensely unpopular bailout of American International Group Inc. In a letter to the head of the Government Accountability Office, the investigative arm of Congress, Bernanke offered to "make available to the GAO all records and personnel...

Federal Reserve Chairman Ben Bernanke said on Wednesday the U.S. economy faces "unusually uncertain" prospects, and that the central bank was ready to take further steps to bolster growth if needed. "Even as the Federal Reserve continues prudent planning for the ultimate withdrawal of monetary policy accommodation, we also recognize that the economic outlook remains unusually uncertain," Bernanke told the Senate Banking Committee. "We remain prepared to take further policy actions as needed to foster a return to full utilization of our nation's productive potential in a context of price stability."

Wall Street rebounded from last week's declines after Federal Reserve Chairman Ben Bernanke said the central bank will continue to keep interest rates low even as the economy shows signs of recovering. Bernanke said during a speech that the Fed would support “continued accommodative policies” to help the economy grow more quickly. He hopes this stance will help create enough jobs to lower the unemployment rate even further. The comments sent major U.S. stock indexes up more than 1% through much of the session.

Despite the recent pickup in job gains, Federal Reserve Chairman Ben S. Bernanke offered a cautious assessment of the labor market and suggested that he would press the Fed to continue or expand the central bank's easy-money policies to ensure further improvements in the unemployment rate.   In a speech Monday at an economics conference, Bernanke maintained that conditions in the job market remain "far from normal," with total hours of work and the number of people working still well below pre-recession levels.

Federal Reserve Chairman Ben Bernanke is going back to school - and the public is invited to watch. As part of his efforts to demystify the nation's central bank, Bernanke has agreed to deliver four lectures to George Washington University. The first, focusing on financial panics that led to the Fed's creation in 1913, can be viewed online starting at 9:45 a.m. PDT Tuesday. Additional lectures this Thursday and on March 27 and 29 will cover the later history of the Fed. Bernanke, a former economics professor at Stanford and Princeton, will become the first Fed boss to teach as a side job. He's already become the first to hold regular news conferences and town hall-style meetings.

U.S. consumers and the economy started the year with more financial pep than previously thought, but Federal Reserve Chairman Ben S. Bernanke cautioned that economic growth probably would be modest through the rest of this year. The nation's recovery from the brutal recession has been "uneven and modest," the Fed chief told Congress on Wednesday, and is being hampered by tight credit for borrowers, a depressed housing market, budget-strapped governments and uncertainties in resolving the European sovereign debt crisis.

Federal Reserve Chairman Ben S. Bernanke's words carried a great deal of weight in the commodity markets — so much so that they squashed the prices of gold and silver. Bernanke told Congress that the U.S. economy was probably headed for modest growth this year, adding that the current increase in oil and gas prices probably would reverse before sparking long-term inflation. The presentation Wednesday signaled to many investors that the Fed's embarking on another round of quantitative easing was an increasingly improbable scenario.

In what has become a familiar refrain from the chairman of the Federal Reserve,  Ben S. Bernanke described the economic recovery Thursday as “frustratingly slow” and said that “significant headwinds” face consumers and the broader economy. In his first public exchange with Congress this year, Bernanke told members of the House Budget Committee that while the economy has been improving recently -- with consumer spending, manufacturing and job growth up in recent months -- the outlook remains uncertain.

Federal Reserve Chairman Ben S. Bernanke won't pull back the central bank's easy money policies any time soon, even as the government is expected to report positive job growth Friday. "Until we see a sustained period of stronger job creation, we cannot consider the recovery to be truly established," Bernanke said Thursday. And though the economic recovery "appears to have strengthened in recent months," that growth isn't happening fast enough, he said. That should be clear Friday, when the government is expected to announce that the economy created about 140,000 jobs in January.

Federal Reserve Chairman Ben S. Bernanke said the U.S. economy still needs low interest rates and that the central bank will be ready to tighten credit "at the appropriate time." "The economy continues to require the support of accommodative monetary policies," Bernanke said Thursday in prepared testimony to the House Financial Services Committee, repeating parts of a statement to the panel from last month. "However, we have been working to ensure that we have the tools to reverse, at the appropriate time, the currently very high degree of monetary stimulus."

Even as Federal Reserve Chairman  Ben S. Bernanke described the recovery as "frustratingly slow," Republican lawmakers lit into the central bank chief's latest efforts to boost the economy. In testifying before the House Budget Committee, Bernanke said Thursday that the economy had been improving recently - with consumer spending, manufacturing and job growth up in recent months. But he repeated his cautious outlook for the economy, mentioning uncertainties about Europe, the still-depressed U.S. housing market and the ability of consumers to keep spending in the face of stagnant incomes, tight credit and weak confidence.

The Federal Reserve's announcement that short-term interest rates are likely to stay low for two years or more drew the usual mix of catcalls and huzzahs, with critics saying the Fed was dooming the country to debilitating inflation and supporters saying it was sensibly encouraging economic growth. Some veteran Fed watchers, however, complained that Chairman Ben S. Bernanke was revealing too much about the board's thinking, which used to be cloaked in the kind of secrecy reserved for missile launch codes and CIA threat assessments.