Bernanke’s Unprecedented Rescue Unlikely to Be Repeated
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As Federal Reserve Chairman Ben S. Bernanke shuts the door to his office for a final time in two days, he can say he took actions that were the first or the biggest of their kind in the central bank’s 100-year history. Some will probably also be the last.
Bernanke was the first to devise a monetary policy that focused on lowering credit costs by suppressing longer-term interest rates after the short-term policy rate hit zero. His strategy, involving direct purchases of agency mortgage-backed securities and longer-term Treasury debt, left the Fed with the biggest balance sheet in its history, $4.1 trillion.