"Persons of the Year" -- and Forces of the Decade

Time Magazine, as you may be aware by now, chose Federal Reserve Chairman Ben Bernanke as its "Person of the Year". Despite the fact that he was not among our own nominees (see our post of December 10, below), we do agree with their choice, and for exactly the reasons they cite. Bernanke led the Federal Reserve in its extraordinary policies and actions to "save" the U.S. and world economies. Their article is quite good in documenting this, and we hope you will take time to read it. Here:
http://www.time.com/time/specials/packages/article/0,28804,1946375_1947251_1947520,00.html.

Bernanke has been widely criticized for both the seeming recklessness of the Fed's massive explosion of the money supply and for the fact that unemployment is still as high as 10%. But the policies have achieved – at least so far – a stabilization of the economy and the beginnings of a return to growth. This outcome contrasts with the Great Depression, when the Fed did not make such generous provisions and even raised its discount rate in view of the greater credit risk in the economy. The result only added to the catastrophe. This exact topic is one of Bernanke's chief research interests as an economist. Perhaps, as Time argues, there could have been no one better heading the Fed at this point in time. Really do it, read it for yourself. And as I've written here before, I don't want to even contemplate the alternative scenario to what the Fed did. Nor are they being foolhardy about the inflation potential, as every policy meeting in recent months has commented on ways to wind down and pull back on all the easy-money actions and some of their emergency programs are already being cut back.

Among Time's "runners-up" were two on our list, Nancy Pelosi and General McChrystal. The magazine highlights someone else of interest, Chinese workers. Isn't that intriguing? More comment on that will appear here at some point. Finally, Monday's Wall Street Journal has a special section reviewing "the aughts", the decade just coming to a close. The leader to that feature mentions two others on our list, reality TV and Susan Boyle. They go much farther than we did in the meanings of these two phenomena; there is great food for thought here:

"The first decade of the 21st century offered ample reminders that even with imperfections, human beings are capable of great triumphs. The aughts will be remembered for the greatest alleviation of poverty in the history of humankind, as the middle class swelled in China, India and elsewhere. It will be remembered for a long list of technological accomplishments . . . . In the U.S., it will be celebrated as the decade in which the nation took a huge step toward breaking free of its legacy of slavery and Civil War by electing a black president.

"And the supersized dose of reality dumped on us during the decade is now informing a search for new answers, new approaches, new models, all based on a better understanding of human nature. . . .

"The hopeful embodiment of this new tone surfaced at the end of the decade, in the person of an unmistakably real woman named Susan Boyle. Never in a thousand decades would she have been cast for a leading role by Hollywood. Yet her performances . . . reminded us that you don't need fantasy to create success. Reality will do just as well."

Merry Christmas from Ways of the World!