Three years into his term as Federal Reserve chairman, and fresh off the dedication of a highway exit in his name, Ben Bernanke is sitting down for his first television interview. The central bank chief will appear Sunday on CBS’s “60 Minutes” in a double-length segment about the financial crisis and recession.
Bernanke
In the first on-air TV interview with a Fed chief in two decades, CBS says, Mr. Bernanke will discuss “what he thinks went wrong with America’s financial system, how it caused the economic crisis, what the Federal Reserve is doing to help fix it and when he expects the crippling recession to end.” The program, which airs Sunday at 7 p.m. Eastern time, will include an interview in Mr. Bernanke’s hometown of Dillon, S.C., with a visit to his old high school. (No word on whether they’ll stop by his now-famous childhood home.)
Fed chairmen generally don’t grant on-the-record interviews, aiming to avoid settings that could confuse or unsettle markets. Of course, Mr. Bernanke delivers speeches regularly (with audience questions often carried on live TV) and testifies frequently before Congress. Last month, he took questions from reporters for the first time in a public setting in an appearance at the National Press Club. In addition, over the years select quotes from interviews with Mr. Bernanke (that were otherwise off-the-record) have occasionally appeared in news outlets.
Still, Mr. Bernanke — a former Princeton economics professor — has struggled throughout the financial crisis to counter claims from lawmakers that he’s helping Wall Street more than Main Street. The “60 Minutes” format, and a walk along Main Street in South Carolina, should help humanize the Fed chief.
It’ll also come at a particularly delicate time for his career. Mr. Bernanke’s four-year appointment as Fed chairman expires in January 2010. After what’s likely to be the longest recession since the Great Depression, President Barack Obama will have to decide by the fall whether to reappoint him.
Aside from the president he's the most powerful man working to save the economy, but you have never seen an interview with Ben Bernanke.
Bernanke is the chairman of the Board of Governors of the Federal Reserve System, better known as the Fed. The words of any Fed chairman cause fortunes to rise and fall and so, by tradition, chairmen of the Fed do not do interviews - that is until now.
The Federal Reserve controls the economy by setting interest rates. But after the crash of 2008, Bernanke invoked emergency powers, and with unprecedented aggressiveness has thrown a trillion dollars at the crisis.
Ben Bernanke may be the most important Fed chairman in history. The question is, can he help lead America out of this deep recession and when?
--------------------------------------------------------------------------------
"Mr. Chairman, I'm gonna start with a question that everyone wants me to ask: when does this end?" 60 Minutes correspondent Scott Pelley asked Bernanke.
"It depends a lot on the financial system," he replied. "The lesson of history is that you do not get a sustained economic recovery as long as the financial system is in crisis. We've seen some progress in the financial markets, absolutely. But until we get that stabilized and working normally, we're not gonna see recovery. But we do have a plan. We're working on it. And I do think that we will get it stabilized, and we'll see the recession coming to an end probably this year. We'll see recovery beginning next year. And it will pick up steam over time."
Asked if he thinks the recession is going to end this year, Bernanke said, "In the sense that this decline will begin to moderate and we'll begin to see leveling off. We won't be back to full employment. But we will see, I hope, the end of these declines that have been so strong in a last couple of quarters."
"But you wouldn't say at this point that we're out of the woods?" Pelley asked.
"No," Bernanke replied. "I think the key issue is the banking system and the financial system."
"Unemployment, as we sit here, is about 8.1 percent. I wonder, do you expect double digit unemployment?" Pelley asked.
"Well, it's hard to forecast exactly where we're going. Unemployment is rising. Job losses are still very severe. And no doubt, the unemployment rate's gonna go higher than it is. But I think, again, that if we do succeed in stabilizing the financial system, that we'll begin to see a slower pace of decline, and eventually, a stabilization that will set the basis for a recovery," Bernanke said.
"You seem to be saying that we're not heading into a new American Depression?" Pelley asked.
"I think we've averted that risk. I think we've gotten past that and now the problem is to get the thing working properly again," the chairman said.
Bernanke, age 55, has been chairman of the Federal Reserve Board since 2006. He had previously served as a Fed governor, then chairman of the President's Council of Economic Advisers, before being appointed as Fed chairman by President George W. Bush.
For this interview, he opened up the Fed headquarters, rarely seen by the public. It's a monumental building along the National Mall. Construction started in 1935 in the depths of the Great Depression.
"You know Mr. Chairman I think the Federal Reserve, for most people, is a mystery," Pelley remarked.
"Well, it's an institution that people don't hear so much about but it's a very important one. It manages monetary policy for the country. It's one of the main tools we have for stabilizing our economy and keeping prices stable," Bernanke said.
Asked when it was founded, Bernanke told Pelley, "The Fed was created by Congress in 1913. And its original purpose was to deal with financial panics, which is what we're doing right now."
Bernanke's crisis started in 2007 with the mortgage meltdown; lenders began to fail. Bernanke cut interest rates repeatedly. In 2008, the Fed stopped the collapse of Bear Stearns by arranging a sale to another firm.
But then came the end of Wall Street as we knew it. Mortgage giants Fannie Mae and Freddie Mac were seized by the government. On Sept. 14, Merrill Lynch was sold in distress. The next day, the 158-year-old investment bank Lehman Brothers failed
"You didn't rescue Lehman Brothers. It set off a worldwide panic when it went bankrupt. And I wonder, looking back, whether you think that was a mistake," Pelley asked.
"There were many people who said, 'Let 'em fail.' You know, 'It's not a problem. The markets will take care of it.' And I think I knew better than that. And Lehman proved that you cannot let a large internationally active firm fail in the middle of a financial crisis. Now was it a mistake? It wasn't a mistake for the following reason: we didn't have the option, we didn't have the tools. All the Federal Reserve can do is make loans against collateral," Bernanke replied.
The day after Lehman, Bernanke's Fed did something astounding: it loaned $85 billion to a company that wasn't a bank at all - American International Group (AIG), the global insurance giant that was also involved in backing risky mortgage investments. Bernanke says, unlike Lehman, the Fed could make the loans based on good collateral in AIG's portfolio.
"There have now been four rescues of AIG, $160 billion. Why is that necessary?" Pelley asked.
"Let me just first say that of all the events and all of the things we've done in the last 18 months, the single one that makes me the angriest, that gives me the most angst, is the intervention with AIG. Here was a company that made all kinds of unconscionable bets. Then, when those bets went wrong, we had a situation where the failure of that company would have brought down the financial system," Bernanke said.
"You say it makes you angry?" Pelley asked.
"It makes me angry. I slammed the phone more than a few times on discussing AIG. I understand why the American people are angry. It's absolutely unfair that taxpayer dollars are going to prop up a company that made these terrible bets, that was operating out of the sight of regulators, but which we have no choice but the stabilize, or else risk enormous impact, not just in the financial system, but on the whole U.S. economy," Bernanke explained.
By September, Bernanke and then-Treasury Secretary Hank Paulson went to Capitol Hill to urge a massive bailout of the banking system, which lawmakers soon passed.
Asked how close of a call it was, Bernanke said, "It was very close. It was very close. The Congress passed the bill that gave Treasury the right to put capital into the banks in the first week of October. And it was in the second week of October that the crisis reached its peak. If we had not had those powers, we could have had a much, much worse outcome. So it was a very dangerous situation."
"Was anyone on Capitol Hill skeptical? Did they push back at all, you know, 'Mr. Chairman, it's probably not quite that bad'?" Pelley asked.
"Well, I do remember one conversation I had where I was addressing a caucus of congressmen. And a congressman said to me, 'Mr. Chairman, you know, I'm talking to bankers in my town. I'm talking to shopkeepers in my town. And they say things are normal. Nothing's going on. We don't see any problem.' And I turned to him and I said, 'You will,'" Bernanke recalled.
That second week of October, the Dow fell 18 percent - its worst week in history. At that point, $8 trillion had been lost.
In the crisis, Bernanke had freedom to act immediately - he doesn't need permission from Congress or the president. While they debated on Capitol Hill, Bernanke cut interest rates nearly to zero; then he used Depression-era emergency powers to launch a dozen rescue programs of his own. There was support for money market funds, mortgages, short term lending to small business, and support for auto loans, student loans and small business loans - commitments of a trillion dollars, doubling the size of the Fed's balance sheet.
Asked if it's tax money the Fed is spending, Bernanke said, "It's not tax money. The banks have accounts with the Fed, much the same way that you have an account in a commercial bank. So, to lend to a bank, we simply use the computer to mark up the size of the account that they have with the Fed. It's much more akin to printing money than it is to borrowing."
"You've been printing money?" Pelley asked.
"Well, effectively," Bernanke said. "And we need to do that, because our economy is very weak and inflation is very low. When the economy begins to recover, that will be the time that we need to unwind those programs, raise interest rates, reduce the money supply, and make sure that we have a recovery that does not involve inflation." He's not kidding about printing money: the Fed issues U.S. currency, which is why it says "Federal Reserve Note" on all the bills in your wallet. The Treasury Department's Bureau of Engraving and Printing is just a few blocks from Bernanke's office. It prints the money at the Fed's request.
The Fed's mandate from Congress is to put enough money i the system for maximum employment, but not so much that it sets off inflation.
The Fed actually pays for itself and returns billions in profits to the Treasury.
In a sense, Bernanke has been preparing for this emergency his whole professional life. He got a PhD in economics from MIT. He chaired the economics department at Princeton, where his specialty was the Great Depression.
He's among many economists who now believe it was the Federal Reserve itself that helped turn a recession in 1929 into a global calamity.
"They made two mistakes, basically. One was they let the money supply contract very sharply. Prices fell. Deflation. So monetary policy was, in fact, very contractionary. Very tight during that period. And then the second mistake they made was they let the banks fail. They didn't make any strong effort to prevent the failure of thousands of banks. And that failure had terrible effects on credit and on the ability of the economy to right itself," Bernanke explained.
Bernanke told 60 Minutes we were close to a second Depression and he is determined to not let the major banks fail on his watch.
"One of the things that I think many people watching this interview don't understand, is why there are multiple bailouts, four bailouts of AIG, three bailouts of Citigroup. There is a sense that this is a band-aid approach, that we're not getting to the root of the problem," Pelley remarked.
"Well, part of the issue is that, you know, the economy has gotten a good bit worse. You know, the first part of the crisis was subprime and other assets that were toxic. Now, we're in a second phase, which is that the economy is very weak," he said. "So the economy's weakness has meant that some of the initial attempts to stabilize the banks haven't been enough, and we've had to do more."
"You know, Mr. Chairman, there are so many people outside this building, across this country, who say, 'To hell with them. They made bad bets. The wages of failure on Wall Street should be failure,'" Pelley remarked.
"Let me give you an analogy, if I might," Bernanke said. "If you have a neighbor, who smokes in bed. And he's a risk to everybody. If suppose he sets fire to his house, and you might say to yourself, you know, 'I'm not gonna call the fire department. Let his house burn down. It's fine with me.' But then, of course, but what if your house is made of wood? And it's right next door to his house? What if the whole town is made of wood? Well, I think we'd all agree that the right thing to do is put out that fire first, and then say, 'What punishment is appropriate? How should we change the fire code? What needs to be done to make sure this doesn't happen in the future? How can we fire proof our houses?' That's where we are now. We have a fire going on."
Bernanke told Pelley that "fire" is still burning.
Asked if all the big banks the Fed regulates are solvent, Bernanke said, "I believe they are, yes. But we are doing a stress test right now, where we're looking at what the positions of the banks are under a tougher economic scenario than the one that we currently expect. And what we plan to do is to say how much capital would each bank need to be well capitalized. Not just solvent, but well capitalized, even in these more adverse scenarios."
"Are you committing in this interview, that you are not going to let any of these banks fail? That no matter what their balance sheet actually looks like, they are not gonna fail?" Pelley asked.
"They are not gonna fail," Bernanke said. "But what we can do, should it be necessary, is try to wind it down in a safe way."
In other words, Bernanke thinks government should stabilize failed financial companies and take them apart slowly. "So, for example, in the case of AIG, we've prevented a bankruptcy, because of the chaos that would create. But we're also demanding that AIG divest itself, sell off its subsidiaries, and use the proceeds to pay back the government," he said.
"What are the dangers now? What keeps you up at night?" Pelley asked.
"I think the biggest risk is that, you know, we don't have the political will. We don't have the commitment to solve this problem, and that we let it just continue. In which case, you know, we can't count on recovery," Bernanke said.
The Fed estimates the wealth of American families fell 18 percent in 2008, the worst since the Great Depression
"Does the Federal Reserve bear any responsibility for missing what was happening to the banks, as it was happening?" Pelley asked.
"Well, like other regulators, we probably could have done more. We've already done a lot of - put a lot of effort into reviewing our practices. And reviewing the bank's practices. We are trying to strengthen our regulation at every point that we can. So, I don't want to deny that we certainly could have done a better job, and others could have done a better job," Bernanke conceded.
Now President Obama and the Congress have a fiscal stimulus plan of nearly $800 billion. There's that separate bailout for financial firms - at least $700 billion. And plans are developing for a way that would take on the bad debt of crippled institutions.
"There was a panic in 1907. So the Fed was created to prevent that from ever happening again. And then we got the Great Depression. And now we have this. How do we prevent this from occurring another time?" Pelley asked.
"Well, tougher regulation of large firms. It includes having a set of laws that allows us to wind down. A large, internationally active firm, without the adverse impacts on the markets that a disorderly bankruptcy would have. It includes possibly having a systemic regulator. A regulator that has some responsibility to look at the system as a whole," Bernanke said.
"Your response has been to do what the Fed didn't do in 1929, and that is pour money into the system. But there's an argument made today that that's not what the problem is. The problem isn't that there's too little money in the system. The problem is there's too much fear in the system. That with these companies being propped up by the government, no one on Wall Street can tell who's solvent and who's not. And therefore, business does not move," Pelley pointed out.
"Well, I absolutely agree that confidence is key," Bernanke said. "People don't know what's happening. And they're afraid. And they're not sure what, you know, whether or not the system is gonna recover. So, how do you get confidence, that's the question. And I think the way to get confidence is to show progress."
Asked if he's seeing any progress, Bernanke said, "I think all of our efforts, so far, have produced results. We're buying about $500 billion in mortgages, in package and securities by the G.S.E.s, Fannie Mae and Freddie Mac. And that seems to have brought down mortgage rates significantly. It allows people to refinance. To get out of high rate mortgages. We are seeing progress in the money market mutual funds, and in the business lending area. And I think as those green shoots begin to appear in different markets and as some confidence begins to come back that will begin the positive dynamic that brings our economy back."
"Do you see green shoots?" Pelley asked.
"I do. I do see green shoots. And not everywhere, but certainly in some of the markets that we've been functioning in. And we've seen some improvement in the banks, as well," Bernanke said.
Asked what the first signs of recovery will be, Bernanke told Pelley, "Well, I think that one sign would be that a large bank is successful in raising private equity. Right now, all the private money is sitting on the sidelines saying, 'We don't know what these banks are worth. We don't know that they're stable.' And they're not willing to put their money into the banks."
"If you had a message for the American People in this interview, what would it be?" Pelley asked.
"Scott, I'd say three things. I'd say, first of all, that the Federal Reserve is here, and is gonna do everything possible to support this recovery. The second thing I would say is that we have to understand, though, that recovery is not gonna happen until the financial markets and the banks are stabilized. And we do have a plan, we have a program for that. But it's gonna take some patience," Bernanke said.
"But the third and final thing I'd just like to say to the American People is that I have every confidence that this economy will recover, and recover in a strong and sustained way. The American people are among the most productive in the world. We have the best technologies. We have great universities. We have entrepreneurs. I just have every confidence that as we get through this crisis, that our economy will begin to grow again, and it will remain the most powerful and dynamic economy in the world."
cbs.com
<
Posts
