http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=iivL4c_3pck
2001 Chicago Public Citizen Radio Interview criticizing the Warren Court as not radical enough for not pursuing redistribution of wealth.
Says that community organizing is for the purpose of assembling the political power to force redistribution of wealth.
The Money Man
Email To A Friend
Please fill in the following information and we'll email this link.
SPONSORED BY
. Greenspan heartily endorsed Bernanke as his successor in 2006—just before the markets turned. Since then, to a startling degree, Bernanke has quietly repudiated the laissez-faire approach of Greenspan. The former Fed chief, whose mantra was that the market was doing fine assessing the risk of "derivatives" on its own, declined to write even marginal regulations for mortgage lending for 14 years despite the 1994 congressional mandate to do so. But Bernanke, in July 2008—far too late to make a difference in the subprime scandal—announced a new "Regulation Z," which finally created some common-sense lending rules such as forbidding mortgages without sufficient documentation. Bernanke is tending toward the conclusion that the Fed is going to have to deal with bubbles before they go on too long. He's still leery of using interest rates to "pop" bubbles, just as Greenspan once shied away from containing "irrational exuberance." But Bernanke believes regulation and oversight will have to be rethought in a major way. The key, he knows, is not to overdo it as in Japan—another economy he has studied closely.
Bernanke does, however, share some qualities with Greenspan. Both were child prodigies at math—"Ben was in first grade for two weeks, and the teacher said he doesn't belong here and put him in second grade," says his Uncle Mort—and both are musicians. Both men are conservative acolytes of arch-free-marketer Milton Friedman. But there the similarities end. While Greenspan leans toward libertarianism—the idea that markets work fine on their own, and government should keep out—Bernanke made his grade at Princeton teaching and studying the greatest market failure of modern times. (Bernanke always loved history as a kid, but he gravitated toward economics—and his study of the Depression—because it was about real people rather than kings and queens.)
Asked how he's managed to stay calmly at the center of the whirlwind all these weeks—with his life's work on the line—Bernanke just shrugs. He still manages to spend some Clark Kent time with his wife, Anna, doing the New York Times crossword puzzle together and watching favorite shows like "House." (Bernanke jokes that as an economist, he's appalled at all the money Dr. House spends in ordering MRIs.) Even so, the Fed chief knows he's not going to have much leisure time in the months ahead. Paulson will almost certainly depart with the new administration. Bernanke—whose term runs until 2010—will have to make his case all over again with a new Congress next January. A lot is riding on his success in doing that. Both the Fed and the Treasury—and by implication the American taxpayer—have gained the kind of authority over the U.S. economy that no one would have dreamed of a few months ago. As a man who began as a small-town boy from Dillon, S.C., says Braddy, Bernanke "understands Main Street as well as he does Wall Street." He will need to make heroic efforts to save both in the years ahead.
© 2008
Discuss