Orwellian Madness “Bernanke Saved The World”
by ilene - August 22nd, 2009 1:06 pm
Orwellian Madness "Bernanke Saved The World"
Courtesy of Mish
The MarketWatch Headline Bernanke: We Saved The World is the height of Orwellian madness.
Please consider the "full story" We saved the world from disaster, Fed’s Bernanke says.
In a speech at the Kansas City Fed’s annual retreat in Jackson Hole, Wyo., Bernanke summarized a hellish year and explained modestly how he and his central bank colleagues saved the world from a bigger disaster.
"The world has been through the most severe financial crisis since the Great Depression," he said. "As severe as the economic impact has been, however, the outcome could have been decidedly worse."
If the Fed, other central banks and other government leaders hadn’t acted in a coordinated and aggressive way in September and October of 2008, "the resulting global downturn could have been extraordinarily deep and protracted," Bernanke said.
The policy response "averted the imminent collapse of the global financial system, an outcome that seemed all too possible to the finance ministers and central bankers."
Reflections on a Year of Crisis
To be fair to Bernanke, he never directly claimed to have "Saved The World". That is a trumped-up headline by MarketWatch.
Here is the key snip from his Jackson Hole speech Reflections on a Year of Crisis.
Since we last met here, the world has been through the most severe financial crisis since the Great Depression. The crisis in turn sparked a deep global recession, from which we are only now beginning to emerge.
As severe as the economic impact has been, however, the outcome could have been decidedly worse. Unlike in the 1930s, when policy was largely passive and political divisions made international economic and financial cooperation difficult, during the past year monetary, fiscal, and financial policies around the world have been aggressive and complementary. Without these speedy and forceful actions, last October’s panic would likely have continued to intensify, more major financial firms would have failed, and the entire global financial system would have been at serious risk. We cannot know for sure what the economic effects of these events would have been, but what we know about the effects of financial crises suggests that the resulting global downturn could have been extraordinarily deep and protracted.
Although we have avoided the worst, difficult challenges still lie ahead. We must work together
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Philip R. Davis is a founder Phil's Stock World, a stock and options trading site that teaches the art of options trading to newcomers and devises advanced strategies for expert traders...
Ilene is editor and affiliate program
coordinator for PSW. She manages the site