Issue of the week: Does Bernanke deserve another term?

Ben Bernanke's reappointment as Federal Reserve Chairman seemed threatened by a "sudden surge of opposition," but as The Week went to press, the White House appeared to have the votes it needed.

It’s still touch-and-go, but it appears that Federal Reserve Chairman Ben Bernanke will get to keep his job, said Sewell Chan in The New York Times. Bernanke’s eight-year term expires Jan. 31, and in recent days, “a sudden surge of opposition” in the Senate threatened to derail his reappointment. At least 12 senators, Democrats and Republicans alike, came forward to oppose him, Still, “the Senate has never rejected a president’s nominee for chairman since the central bank was created in 1913,” and as The Week went to press, the White House appeared to have the votes it needed. But if Bernanke survives “the populist revolt,” said Colin Barr in Fortune, it will be largely “because of fears that a change will scare the heck out of financial markets.”

That’s a legitimate concern, said Dallas Federal Reserve Bank President Richard Fisher in The Wall Street Journal. The fact is, Bernanke has been used as ���a political punching bag” by Congress, presenting the alarming possibility that going forward, “elected officials will politicize the Federal Reserve and compromise its independence.” Has anyone in Washington considered how global investors would react if they knew that “Congress might seek to pressure the Fed to print its way out of this crisis”? What’s more, bouncing Bernanke now, without an obvious successor, would leave the Fed “rudderless,” said Edmund Andrews in the financial blog CapitalGainsandGames.com. That’s “never a good idea, but especially not when the economy and markets are still fragile.”

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