Despite President Obama’s praise for Bernanke’s “ … bold action and out-of-the-box thinking,” the Fed chairman boasts a long losing streak of making wrong economic forecasts and misreading the economic tea leaves.
In a CNBC interview, July 29, 2005, the Harvard-graduated, former Princeton Professor of Economics, Fed chairman was asked:
Q. “Tell me, what is the worst-case scenario if we in fact see [real estate] prices actually come down substantially across the country?”
A. “Well I guess I don’t buy your premise. It’s a pretty unlikely possibility; we have never had a decline in house prices on a nationwide basis.”
Speaking before Congress 18 months later (28 February 2007), as the subprime mortgage fiasco deepened, Bernanke said: “There is not much indication at this point that subprime mortgage issues have spread into the broader mortgage market which still seems to be healthy.”
Regardless of how many new egregious failures the governmental and bureaucratic nobility add to their old egregious failures, rarely are they held accountable.