Bernanke defends policies at Fed in new blog

Ben Bernanke no longer leads the Federal Reserve, but the former South Carolinian is hardly letting up in his defense of the ultra-low-rate policies he engineered – and his successor, Janet Yellen, has continued.

In his first post as a new blogger Monday, Bernanke struck back at critics who he said had charged the Bernanke Fed with, among other things, “throwing seniors under the bus” by keeping rates too low for too long.

He also disputed accusations that the Fed is still distorting financial markets and investment decisions by keeping rates “artificially low.”

Both criticisms, Bernanke wrote in “Ben Bernanke’s Blog,” reflect a misunderstanding of economic reality. He said he would blog “periodically, when the spirit moves me.”

His first post gave Bernanke a platform to continue the efforts he began as Fed chairman to justify the low-rate policies the Fed pursued under his leadership. The Fed cut its key short-term rate to a record low near zero in 2008 and has kept it there since.

Supporters say those rates have helped rejuvenate the economy. Critics counter that they have raised the risk of high inflation and are distorting financial markets.

Bernanke was born in Augusta, Ga., and grew up in Dillon, S.C., where he attended local public schools. Bernanke later earned his bachelor’s degree in economics from Harvard University and his Ph.D. in economics from Massachusetts Institute of Technology.

After eight years as Fed chairman, Bernanke stepped down early last year and became a senior fellow at the Brookings Institution in Washington. He has spent the past year writing a book on his time at the Fed and giving speeches.

In his blog post, he argued that raising short-term rates during a time of weak growth and high unemployment just to give retirees a higher yield on savings accounts would “have been exactly the wrong thing to do.”

Doing so, he said, would likely have further slowed the economy. And he said it probably would have forced the Fed to reverse course and resume cutting rates to respond to the weaker growth.

“This is hardly a hypothetical scenario,” Bernanke wrote. “In recent years, several major central banks have prematurely raised interest rates, only to be forced by a worsening economy to backpedal and retract the increases.”

This story was originally published March 30, 2015 at 11:27 PM with the headline "Bernanke defends policies at Fed in new blog."