'Quiet Radical' Bernanke Reinvents Fed

Barack Obama has a huge decision coming up this summer: whether to reappoint Ben Bernanke as chairman of the Fed or turn to obvious challenger Lawrence Summers. If he’s smart, he’ll stick with the soft-spoken incumbent, writes David Ignatius of the Washington Post. “He has been a veritable tiger,” he writes. “The Bernanke Fed is so much more powerful than its predecessors that it’s almost a different institution.”

Bernanke erected what Ignatius calls “jury-rigged rescue programs” to pump confidence into the economy because, he tells the columnist, the financial crisis resembled an old-fashioned 19th-century bank panic. New information revealed that assets weren’t as safe as investors had believed, so they ran for the exits. Obama will want a Fed chairman who can clean up those hastily erected structures. Maybe it’s Summers. “But there’s a strong argument for not changing what looks like a winning team.” (More Ben Bernanke stories.)