Wednesday, December 16, 2009

Time Magazine’s Person of the Year is Ben Bernanke



It looks like Time Magazine has lost that loving feeling for Obama. Not only is Obama not the Person of the Year, he did not even make runner up! Obama did not even make the top 5 runner-ups.

Given how Time hyped Obama to death, you would think that they would have had him somewhere in the top spots for his first year in office. I guess they realize that Obama is becoming one hell of a disappointment and they would rather not remind readers that they had a major hand in foisting him on the public.  Sorry, Time but some of us remember all those cover stories too well.

From Time Magazine
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. Those green bills featuring dead Presidents are labeled "Federal Reserve Note" for a reason: the Fed controls the money supply. It is an independent government agency that conducts monetary policy, which means it sets short-term interest rates — which means it has immense influence over inflation, unemployment, the strength of the dollar and the strength of your wallet. 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. He didn't just reshape U.S. monetary policy; he led an effort to save the world economy.
Time’s Person of the Year runner-ups were, General Stanley McChrystal, The Chinese Worker, Nancy Pelosi (say what?) and Usain Bolt.

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