Bernanke Says Partisanship Will Makes it Hard for Economic Growth

May 8, 2017 Share Print 0

Ben Bernanke isn’t optimistic that Democrats and Republicans will be reaching across the aisle anytime soon to help the US economy.

“The partisanship is extraordinarily strong,” Bernanke told CNN’s Fareed Zakaria in an interview that aired Sunday. “It’s going to make it harder for Democrats and Republicans to come together and agree on policies which are effective and which really help the economy.”

Bernanke knows about such partisanship first hand. As Federal Reserve Chair from 2006 to 2014, Bernanke testified before a bitterly divided Congress at least twice a year. Sometimes he would be questioned more often because of the financial crisis in 2008 and the extraordinary role the country’s central bank took to save the economy.

To buoy the collapsed US housing market, Bernanke slashed interest rates in 2008 to 0%, where they stayed until late 2015. During that time, however, Congress and the Obama administration were stuck in gridlock, unable to enact any fiscal policies to truly boost economic growth.

Supporters say Bernanke helped the US economy avert a far more severe economic crisis. Critics argue his policy to buy up trillions of dollars of debt, which ended in late 2014, has long term consequences that hurt the US economy and stock markets.

via CNN

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Alfonso Esparza

Senior Currency Analyst at Market Pulse

Alfonso Esparza specializes in macro forex strategies for North American and major currency pairs. Upon joining OANDA in 2007, Alfonso Esparza established the MarketPulseFX blog and he has since written extensively about central banks and global economic and political trends. Alfonso has also worked as a professional currency trader focused on North America and emerging markets. He has been published by The MarketWatch, Reuters, the Wall Street Journal and The Globe and Mail, and he also appears regularly as a guest commentator on networks including Bloomberg and BNN. He holds a finance degree from the Monterrey Institute of Technology and Higher Education (ITESM) and an MBA with a specialization on financial engineering and marketing from the University of Toronto.