伯南克被提名连任美联储主席

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It’s been a particular privilege for me to serve with these extraordinary colleagues throughout the Federal Reserve System. 

Tuesday’s announcement may have come in the midst of a summer vacation, but Ben Bernanke’s time as Federal Reserve chief has been no picnic.

“I, Ben S. Bernanke…”

Firstly, he had to follow in the footsteps of a legend in 2006, at a time when Alan Greenspan was credited with an uNPRecedented boom in the US economy. Then, Bernanke was tasked with having to clean up the mess of an economic crisis. In 2007, critics pounced when Bernanke made this statement after the American mortgage market started to falter. “We do not expect significant spillovers in the sub-prime market to the rest of the economy or to the financial system.”

In fact, the spillover was the worst since the Great Depression. Bear Stearns, Lehman Brothers, AIG, General Motors, the American economic landscape changed forever. So how does financial analyst Todd Benjamin rate Bernanke’s first term?

“Think of an old American report card where A is very good and E is failure, where would you give Bernanke, for the first three years?”

“Well, look, I think if you are dealing in…early on, in his term, you’d probably give him, let’s say, a D, all right? (Wow!) But, early on, all right? Because he didn’t realize the severity of the sub-prime crisis. But you know, the job he’s doing now, you gotta give him probably a B plus and probably at least an A minus, maybe even an A, because he took the economy from the brink. It’s getting back on track. The big challenge for Ben Bernanke going forward, I’m not saying in next six months, maybe not even in the next year, but in the next, you know, four years, is going to be his exit strategy. How does he rein in all this liquidity that they’ve got out there because there’s oceans of it?”

Critics often say that Fed was too interventionist that the political aims of the White House influenced the Fed. But to anyone who might have wanted Bernanke replaced, supporters say, what would have been the alternative?

Jim Boulden, cnn, London.

Vocabulary:

1.       be no picnic: if something is no picnic, it is very difficult and needs a lot of effort or hard work

2.       spillover: the effect that one situation or problem has on another situation

3.       rein in: to start to control a situation more strictly