I found this to be quite the interesting (and somewhat surprising) choice for 2009’s Person of the Year. What are your thoughts and opinions on TIME’s choice?
Ben Bernanke named Time Person of the Year
http://www.politico.com/news/stories/1209/30662.html
Federal Reserve Chairman Ben Bernanke, who helped steer the nation through the worst economic crisis since the Great Depression, was named TIME Person of the Year 2009 on Tuesday, eclipsing finalists who included President Barack Obama and House Speaker Nancy Pelosi.
“He didn’t just reshape U.S. monetary policy; he led an effort to save the world economy,” Time’s Michael Grunwald writes in the cover story, which will be on newsstands Friday.
Asked by Time in a Dec. 8 interview if bankers make too much money, Bernanke replied: “I think that bankers ought to recognize that the government and the taxpayer saved the financial system from utter collapse last year. And in recognizing that, I would think that bankers ought to look in the mirror and decide that perhaps there should be some more restraint in how much they pay themselves, given what the government and the taxpayer did to protect the system.”
In a letter explaining the choice to readers, Time Managing Editor Richard Stengel calls Bernanke “The Good Banker.”
“The recession was the story of the year. Without Ben Bernanke, Time’s 2009 Person of the Year, it would have been a lot worse,” Stengel writes. “Bernanke didn’t just learn from history; he wrote it himself and was damned if he was going to repeat it. Bernanke decided to do the opposite of what the Fed did back in the ’30s: he would loosen the money supply as far as it would go, he would save as many banks as he could, and he wasn’t going to hector the American public about pulling up their socks.”
Stengel had revealed a “short list” of finalists that also included Apple co-founder Steve Jobs; “The Chinese Worker”; Gen. Stanley McChrystal, the U.S. commander in Afghanistan; and Jamaican sprinter Usain Bolt.
Grunwald’s cover story calls Bernanke “the most powerful nerd on the planet.”
“A bald man with a gray beard and tired eyes is sitting in his oversize Washington office, talking about the economy,” Grunwald writes. “He doesn’t have a commanding presence. He isn’t a mesmerizing speaker. … Bernanke is the 56-year-old chairman of the Federal Reserve, the central bank of the U.S., the most important and least understood force shaping the American—and global—economy. … And ever since global credit markets began imploding, its mild-mannered¬ chairman has dramatically expanded those powers and reinvented the Fed. Professor Bernanke of Princeton was a leading scholar of the Great Depression. He knew how the passive Fed of the 1930s helped create the ¬calamity—through its stubborn refusal to expand the money supply and its tragic lack of imagination and experimentation. Chairman Bernanke of Washington was determined not to be the Fed chairman who presided over Depression 2.0.
“So when turbulence in U.S. housing markets metastasized into the worst global financial crisis in more than 75 years, he conjured up trillions of new dollars and blasted them into the economy; engineered massive public rescues of failing private companies; ratcheted down interest rates to zero; lent to mutual funds, hedge funds, foreign banks, investment banks, manufacturers, insurers and other borrowers who had never dreamed of receiving Fed cash; jump-¬started stalled credit markets in everything from car loans to corporate paper; revolutionized housing finance with a breathtaking shopping spree for mortgage bonds; blew up the Fed’s balance sheet to three times its previous size; and generally transformed the staid arena of central banking into a stage for desperate improvisation.”
Grunwald concludes: “As the terrifying memories of free-falling markets fade, Bernanke has become a political victim of his apolitical success. His boldness in the crisis feels like yesterday’s news. But if he’s adopting a less aggressive approach to guiding a weak economy around skittish markets, it’s not because he’s timid, stupid or indifferent to Main Street. He’s earned the benefit of the doubt. It’s now up to our dysfunctional political system to let him do his job—and to fix the financial system so that he never has to save the world again.”
Bernanke faces Time’s cover curse
America’s “mild-mannered economic overlord” may not be a mesmerizing speaker, but Time magazine decided to name Ben Bernanke Person of the Year 2009 anyway for steering the global economy through the credit crisis and recession.
Calling the 56-year-old chairman of the Federal Reserve “the most powerful nerd on the planet” and praising him for his “boldness in the crisis,” Time granted Bernanke the honour for dramatically expanding the central bank’s power, reinventing the Fed and leading the world out of doom.
“It’s now up to our dysfunctional political system to let him do his job — and to fix the financial system so that he never has to save the world again.”
Despite this support, Bernanke may in fact be the least-liked Person of the Year of all time. His approval rating is just 21%, according to pollster Rasmussen.
However, that probably isn’t the case since Hitler, Stalin and the Ayatollah Khomeini have all won the award, notes Clusterstock’s Joe Weisenthal.
New York Times columnist Paul Krugman warns of Time’s cover curse and suggests investors should always short the stock of the company whose CEO is the subject of a glowing cover story in any major magazine.
He also highlights the specific Time effect, reminding readers of the 1985 portrait of Madonna and Cyndi Lauper. The magazine predicted that Lauper would prove to be the lasting star.
In Feb. 1999, Time put then Federal Reserve Chair Alan Greenspan, Treasury Secretary Robert Rubin and his deputy Lawrence Summers on the cover, labeling them “The Committee to Save the World.”
“Be afraid, be very afraid,” warns Krugman.
Time Man of the Year 2009 – Ben Bernanke Named Time Person of the Year
http://www.gather.com/viewArticle.action?articleId=281474977949880
(Read the full article and watch an additional video including Bernanke at the above link)
Time Man of the Year 2009, or to be politically correct, Time Person of the Year, has been announced! So who is the Time Man of the Year 2009 at the end of this controversial year?
This morning on the Today show, Time Managing Editor Rick Stengel announced the Time Man of the Year 2009. The Time Person of the Year for 2009 is Ben Bernanke.
According to the Huffington Post, Stengel stated, “The winner is Ben Bernanke, Chairman of the Federal Reserve, the most powerful, least understood government force shaping our lives.” Click the link to watch the formal announcement of the Time Man of the Year 2009.
To find out more about the Time Person of the Year, Ben Shalom Bernanke, click here to read about him in Wikipedia.
What do you think, in light of the country’s current financial condition, of Ben Bernanke being named Time Man of the Year 2009?
Bernanke is Time’s Person of the Year
http://blogs.abcnews.com/theworldnewser/2009/12/bernanke-is-times-man-of-the-year.html
What a difference a week makes…
Last week, Ben Bernanke faced a public flogging in the Senate Banking Committee, which votes tomorrow on his nomination to a second term as Chairman of the Federal Reserve. A vocal minority blamed him for being asleep at the switch as banks leveraged themselves to the hilt with bad loans and called on him to resign. Today he is being lauded by Time magazine as the man who saved the nation and the world from a second Great Depression.
As Bernanke himself has acknowledged, there’s some truth to both views. The formerPrinceton economics professor has been frank to say “mistakes” were made at the Fed, which failed in one of its primary missions of overseeing the safety and soundness of banks. But he is also quick to argue that without the massive bailouts he and former Treasury Secretary Hank Paulson engineered last fall, the nation today would be mired in an economic crisis far worse than the one it’s in.
Bernanke supporters–and there are plenty of them in the financial community–have long said it’s tough to get credit for something that didn’t happen. But Time has decided to do just that in naming Bernanke its Person of the Year. Now we wait for Congress to sign off on him keeping his job for another four years.
