Rich Miller of Bloomberg reports:
Global investors give Federal Reserve Chairman Ben S. Bernanke top marks for combating the worst financial crisis since the Great Depression and overwhelmingly favor his reappointment amid optimism that the world economy is on the mend.
Well, I don’t favor it — and this has nothing to do with whether Bernanke has done a good job or not. Just look at a couple of the quotes Miller dug up. “He’s the best, maybe around the world,” says one guy. “If he weren’t renominated, it could have potentially very serious and severe repercussions on the stock market and the economy,” says another. Spare me.
Look: Bernanke isn’t indispensable, any more than Alan Greenspan or Paul Volcker or William McChesney Martin were. But everyone thought they were indispensable at the time, and that’s a dangerous way to think about these guys. Putting Fed chairmen on a pedestal, as the financial community does routinely, breeds both complacency and insularity. In the long run, it’s bad for business.
Wall Street needs to calm down and learn that being Fed chairman for a few years doesn’t make someone superhuman. The world won’t end if Bernanke is replaced by one of the other dozen or so highly qualified candidates available, and Obama should take the chance to demonstrate this when he chooses Bernanke’s replacement.
