Ben Bernanke

Ben S. Bernanke served as chairman of the Federal Reserve from 2006 to 2014. He was named Time magazine's "Person of the Year" in 2009. Prior to his career in public service, he was a professor of economics at Princeton University.

Bernanke's latest book is The Courage to Act: A Memoir of a Crisis and Its Aftermath.

From the transcript of his May 2017 interview with NPR's Rachel Martin:

MARTIN: You were thrust into the worst economic recession this country has seen in generations and were forced to make very difficult decisions in dramatic fashion to prop up the economy during the recession. When you look back now and when you look forward, are you confident that we won't see the likes of that in the near term or medium term?

BERNANKE: Well, we had to stabilize that situation. And then we had to take strong action to help the economy recover. We - and I say - now, I'm talking about policymakers in general and the whole economy - have been successful in recovering and bringing the economy back to a more normal situation. Now, I do have some concern about this in that we did a lot of work following the crisis to improve our oversight of the financial system to make sure that banks have more capital. And I'm a bit concerned that some of the proposals in Congress today would roll back a lot of those important regulations.

I don't mean to say that all regulations are effective. I'm not saying that you can't make changes. But the key elements of the Dodd-Frank financial regulatory reforms that were done, including higher capital levels, tougher oversight and in particular the tools we needed to unwind a failing financial giant so it didn't bring down the whole economy. Those things were put in place, and I'd be very, very concerned about the future if those things were...[read on]

--Marshal Zeringue