Bernanke on the edge
http://www.google.com/hostednews/afp/article/ALeqM5jEZkhT3l-QCsZ2i5D-kvPWxkocZQ
President Barack Obama should seize a “golden opportunity” to rewrite the rules on Wall Street by replacing Ben Bernanke at the head of the Federal Reserve, a US senator said Friday.
Independent Senator Bernie Sanders, one of Bernanke’s chief critics, said “a new Obama appointee could transform the Fed into an instrument for the middle class of this country rather than high-rolling Wall Street executives.”
“The defeat of Ben Bernanke would give President Obama a golden opportunity to nominate someone who will move the Fed in a new direction and put an end to the Fed?s relationship with big banks and Wall Street,” he said in a statement.
Sanders’s appeal came amid growing doubts that the US Senate would confirm Bernanke to a second term as the US central banker amid mounting opposition in an election-year dominated by worries about the economy.
Democrats and Sanders, one of their reliable allies, charge Bernanke helped craft policies that led to the 2008 global financial meltdown and coddled Wall Street while ignoring the pain on Main Street.
Bernanke, first nominated by Obama predecessor George W. Bush, has presided over a financial system that “has not been as unsafe, unsound, and unstable since the Great Depression,” Sanders said.
Bernanke’s Republican critics accuse him of overseeing excessive US government involvement in the economy, citing the late 2008 Wall Street bailout and other interventions.
Senator Evan Bayh, an Indiana Democrat, predicted that Federal Reserve Chairman Ben S. Bernanke will be confirmed by the U.S. Senate for a second term even as Bernanke has been swept into a “populist fever” after Democrats’ loss of a Senate seat in Massachusetts this week.
“I think he will” be confirmed, Bayh, 54, said in an interview on Bloomberg Television’s “Political Capital with Al Hunt,” which airs this weekend. “I think there would be a very adverse reaction in the markets if he were not. But the populist fever that’s out there today, raging very high, seems to have touched upon him. Based on some of the comments in my own caucus, he in some ways has become a symbol. Unjustly in my opinion.”
Bernanke has admitted privately to Bayh that he’s made mistakes, Bayh said. The Fed chairman believes he has learned lessions and “to me he is best positioned to put us on the right path,” Bayh said.
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looks like he will survive..but massachusetts has made anything possible right now..
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