Published: 08 October 2015 – http://www.cepr.net/ – Beat the Press – Dean Baker’s commentary on economic reporting.
“Ben Bernanke was on the Diane Rehm show on Tuesday (unsolicited plug: one of the most serious talk shows around). Anyhow, there was much good back and forth on the show. I will skip over most of what the former Fed chair said (here‘s my comment on saving Lehman), but I do want to address his response to the question of why the Fed didn’t see the financial crisis coming. Here’s the sequence:
“REHM It’s remarkable that you said that the recent financial crisis was the worst in human history, even worse than the Great Depression. But that’s where I think an awful lot of people wonder, if it was so big, why didn’t you see it coming and why couldn’t you have done something to stop it before it happened?”