Bernanke has been interested in the Great Depression since his grandmother told him stories about it from her front porch in Charlotte, N.C., during quiet summer evenings. Her family had been living in Norwich, Conn., where some children went to school in worn-out shoes or even barefoot because their fathers lost their jobs when the shoe factories closed. That meant their families didn’t have enough money to buy shoes — which presumably would have kept the factories in business and their fathers employed.
I agree for the most part with the following, but how do you distinguish between human actions and a process, the securitization to name it, that once pushed to its limits and at a fragile moment gives birth to monsters all around?
And didn’t Bernanke knew about the unprecedent levels and untested territories of loan originations that were about to be pooled into CDOs ?
I doubt he was unaware.
He would have favored more individual accountability. “While you want to do everything you can to fix corporations that have bad cultures and encourage bad behavior — and the Fed was very much engaged in doing that — obviously illegal acts ultimately are done by individuals, not by legal fictions.”
