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It’s the price of success: people start to think you’re omnipotent.

Ben Bernanke

The more guidance a central bank can provide the public about how policy is likely to evolve the greater the chance that market participants will make appropriate inferences.
BEN BERNANKE

Chance Guidance Inference
Investment banks manage to go bankrupt through their investment-banking activities, commercial banks manage to go bankrupt through their commercial-banking activities.
BEN BERNANKE

Banking Banks Commercial Investment
In the future, my communications with the public and with the markets will be entirely through regular and formal channels.
BEN BERNANKE

Communication Formal
I assure this committee that, if I am confirmed, I will be strictly independent of all political influences… essential to that institution’s ability to function effectively and achieve its mandated objectives.
BEN BERNANKE

Essentials Independent Political
It must be awfully frustrating to get a small raise at work and then have it all eaten by a higher cost of commuting.
BEN BERNANKE

Cost Frustrating Raises
The Federal Reserve is not currently forecasting a recession.
BEN BERNANKE

Federal Forecasting Recession Reserve
The more important reason is that the research itself provides an important long-run perspective on the issues that we face on a day-to-day basis.
BEN BERNANKE

Issues Perspective Running
The Federal Reserve will not monetize the debt.
BEN BERNANKE

Debt Federal Reserve Reserves
The economist John Maynard Keynes said that in the long run, we are all dead. If he were around today he might say that, in the long run, we are all on Social Security and Medicare.
BEN BERNANKE

Long might Running
We’ve never had a decline in house prices on a nationwide basis. So, what I think what is more likely is that house prices will slow, maybe stabilize, might slow consumption spending a bit. I don’t think it’s going to drive the economy too far from its full employment path, though.
BEN BERNANKE

Employment House Thinking
Both humanity’s capacity to innovate and the incentives to innovate are greater today than at any other time in history.
BEN BERNANKE

Humanity Incentives Today
Every effort needs to be made to try and offset the costs of Katrina and Rita by reductions in other government programs, especially those that are wasteful, duplicative and ineffective.
BEN BERNANKE

Effort Government Trying
The risk that the economy has entered a substantial downturn appears to have diminished over the past month or so.
BEN BERNANKE

Months Past Risk
I generally leave the details of fiscal programs to the Administration and Congress. That’s really their area of authority and responsibility, and I don’t think it’s appropriate for me to second guess.
BEN BERNANKE

Details Responsibility Thinking
Life is amazingly unpredictable; any 22-year-old who thinks they know where they will be in 10 years, much less in 30, is simply lacking imagination.
BEN BERNANKE

Imagination Thinking Years
I served seven years as the chair of the Princeton economics department where I had responsibility for major policy decisions, such as whether to serve bagels or doughnuts at the department coffee hour.
BEN BERNANKE

Coffee Responsibility Years

It’s the price of success: people start to think you’re omnipotent.

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It’s the price of success: people start to think you’re omnipotent.

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