Not according to the WSJ. It tells us that economists are near unanimous in thinking that Federal Reserve Board Chairman Ben Bernanke should be reappointed. After telling us that the economists who it polled were nearly unanimous in believing that Bernanke should be reappointed as Fed chair, the article concludes: "Though the economists were overwhelmingly supportive of Mr. Bernanke, they don't think his tenure was without mistakes. A slow initial response to the credit squeeze and the decision to let Lehman Brothers fail were cited as the biggest errors." The article never once mentions Bernanke's error in allowing the housing bubble to grow to a size where its collapse would inevitably produce a disastrous downturn. Bernanke completely ignored the bubble first as a Fed governor from 2002 to 2005, then as head of President Bush's Council of Economic Advisors until he took over as Fed chair in January of 2006, and in his tenure as Fed chair until the collapse of the bubble brought on the downturn. It would be difficult to imagine a more catastrophic mistake by an economic policymaker than missing such an enormous economic behavior. There are few people in any job who have ever committed such an enormous error. Yet, the WSJ never even mentions it. (Obviously another example of the soft bigotry of low expectations for economic policymakers.) It would be interesting to see the results of a poll on Bernanke's reappointment of economists who did recognize the housing bubble and the danger it posed to the economy.
--Dean Baker
