I know I'm a little late to the party but I've been reading the transcript of the Ben Bernanke interview on "60 Minutes" and I'm amazed at how candid he's been on some subjects. Was his selective candor a way to avoid being completely truthful about other subjects (like bank solvency)? Probably, but this is what he says about letting Lehman Brothers fail:
"There were many people who said, “Let them fail.” You know, it’s not a problem. The markets will take care of it. And I– 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."
This is his simple answer to a simple question:
"Pelley: You’ve been printing money?
Bernanke: Well, effectively."
No bullshit Fed-speak answer there.
This is what he says about the state of financial regulation in the US:
"We had a regulatory system that was like a sand castle on the beach. When you had little small waves just lapping up against the sand castle, everything looked good. But when you had a big breaker come in, suddenly it– the system wasn’t strong enough to deal with it."
A few days later, as if to prove that he means business when he assures us the Fed will use all available tools to get us out of this recession, Bernanke declares he and his FOMC friends will engage in some serious quantitative easing with the purchase of an additional $750 billion of agency mortgage-backed securities and the whopper: $300 billion of long-dated Treasuries.
Speaking of interviews and on a somewhat unrelated note, judging by this interview Joaquin Phoenix gave a few hours before his alleged breakdown on Letterman, he's either one hundred percent honest or he's the greatest (and most demented) actor of all time. Either way, he'll never work on Hollywood again.
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