The Federal Reserve didn't throw US seniors "under the bus" by keeping interest rates near zero for more than six years, former Fed boss Ben Bernanke said Monday in the first entry of his new blog.
That's right, Bernanke, the man who spent eight years as the head of the nation's central bank carefully watching his every comment, is now a blogger, writing "Ben Bernanke's Blog" for The Brookings Institution where he is a senior fellow.
As the Fed boss, Bernanke was often criticized for the Fed's low interest rate policy because it hurt seniors and other others who depended on interest income.
Lower interest rates cut into the income the savings of seniors produces.
But Bernanke wasn't buying that argument.
"When I was chairman, more than one legislator accused me and my colleagues on the Fed's policy-setting Federal Open Market Committee of "throwing seniors under the bus" (to use the words of one senator) by keeping interest rates low," Bernanke wrote in his blog posting.
"The legislators were concerned about retirees living off their savings and able to obtain only very low rates of return on those savings," he explained.
"I was concerned about those seniors as well," Bernanke continued, and "raising interest rates prematurely would have been exactly the wrong thing to do. In the weak (but recovering) economy of the past few years, all indications are that . . . a premature increase in interest rates engineered by the Fed would therefore have likely led after a short time to an economic slowdown and, consequently, lower returns on capital investments."
"The slowing economy in turn would have forced the Fed to capitulate and reduce market interest rates again," the former Central Bank boos wrote. "This is hardly a hypothetical scenario: In recent years, several major central banks have prematurely raised interest rates, only to be forced by a worsening economy to back pedal and retract the increases."
"Ultimately," Bernanke wrote, "the best way to improve the returns attainable by savers was to do what the Fed actually did: keep rates low (closer to the low equilibrium rate), so that the economy could recover and more quickly reach the point of producing healthier investment returns."
Brookings said that Bernanke will use the blog to share his observations and opinions about current economic events, while welcoming questions and comments from readers.
"Now that I'm a civilian again, I can once more comment on economic and financial issues without my words being put under the microscope by Fed watchers," Bernanke said in a statement.
Brookings said Bernanke's blog would also occasionally touch on baseball. Bernanke, who served as Fed chairman from February 2006 until January 2014, is a big baseball fan.
He has spent the past year writing a book about the causes and government responses to the 2007 to 2009 financial crisis. The book is scheduled to be published this fall by W.W. Norton.
Anda sedang membaca artikel tentang
Bernanke addresses senior-citizen critique in debut blog post
Dengan url
http://solusiagarsehat.blogspot.com/2015/03/bernanke-addresses-senior-citizen.html
Anda boleh menyebar luaskannya atau mengcopy paste-nya
Bernanke addresses senior-citizen critique in debut blog post
namun jangan lupa untuk meletakkan link
Bernanke addresses senior-citizen critique in debut blog post
sebagai sumbernya
0 komentar:
Posting Komentar