美联储和情人节之间好像并没有同时出现在同一句话中。但是这是个社会传媒的时代，所以有人在Twitterverse上发起向美联储致以情人节的问候，是不可避免的事情。一条Twitter写道：“当我看到收益率曲线时，我知道我不会失败的。”
许多人在这个位于宪法大道上的神秘建筑中获得了很多的乐趣，而在这里幽默和爱情恰好是不适合出现在这里的。就在情人节前不久，美联储主席伯南克再赴国会山，出席参议院作证。国会预算委员会主席Paul Ryan质问伯南克有关通货膨胀问题（通胀问题现在并不存在，但是Ryan和其他的共和党议员坚持认为新一轮的通胀来势汹涌。）另一个位共和党议员则就美联储最近发布的房地产报告训斥伯南克，这位议员认为这份报告是在砸国会自己的脚。这一切都说明伯南克和美联储引发了人们发自肺腑的厌恶情绪：Ron Paul一帮人都大喊：“取消美联储。”
深层次挖掘政治层面下的白色噪音，那么你会听到一个完全不同的版本——这是一个有关一位谦逊而又略带羞涩的华盛顿沉默的英雄的故事。伯南克的捍卫者坚持认为面临如此强劲的政治反对派，伯南克的做法令人刮目相看，同时他所采取的政策也独具胆识。拜登总统的首席经济学家Jared Bernstein表示，伯南克将会成为美联储最有创新精神的主席之一。
当2006年布什当选为美国总统任免伯南克为美联储主席时，伯南克就是一直是非常温和甚至是保守的共和党人，甚至在最一开始就被认为有些老学究和过于谨慎。有人这样评价伯南克：他精通宏观经济学，但是对市场的了解并不多。而且对政治简直是毫不知晓。接下来危机真的爆发了。
大部分的左翼批评者，都认为伯南克对时局变化的反应太慢。自由派经济学家Dean Baker表示，就像2002年已经在美联储工作，但是直到2007年夏天还没有看到房地产市场的泡沫，这根本是不可原谅的。
其他的经济学家言辞更为犀利，因为现在美国的处境是史无前例的。哥伦比亚大学的Michael Woodford表示，不可能去借鉴已有的定律。伯南克带给现状一个十分重要的工具就是：他在求学期间对于大萧条时期的深刻研究。伯南克对新闻周刊的记者说，20世纪30年代的美联储采取了相对比较保守的措施，但是最终还是失败了。所以这位共和党人崇拜罗斯福总统敢于尝试和不畏传统观念的勇气——比如让美国脱离黄金法则的束缚和建立存款保险。
伯南克所采取的措施——低利率和量化宽松货币政策增加货币供给，众人皆知。但是这种干预的程度并不大，考虑一下现实：奥巴马总统的8000亿美元财政议案还在讨论之中。美联储为刺激经济增长已经注入了2万亿美元的资金。这样做的同时已经是在赚钱了，去年一年在汇款上，就为美国的财政创造了7700亿美元的收入。
批评者对伯南克的评论并不是毫无根据的：保守派人士并不喜欢货币刺激政策，就像不喜欢立法版本的政策一样。但是这种批评的声音最后又成为了这样的说法：伯南克的政策是在给奥巴马总统摆脱深渊寻找出路。Barney Frank参议院美联储问题上的民主党领导人，表示右翼人士批判的事情，正是美联储出于美国国民利益考虑所做的事情。他们之所以很沮丧，是因为伯南克使他们其中的一员。有些人不禁问道，伯南克为什么要这么做呢？
美联储观察员们则对伯南克做出了高度的赞扬。许多人认为伯南克将这个神秘的组织更加公开透明化。现在美国公开市场委员的会议上已经有公开的反对意见出现了，在格林斯潘时期这是绝对不可能发生的。在2010年之前都在为伯南克工作的美联储前副主席Donald Kohn这样说：“伯南克改变了公开委员会的运行方式，以及和公众沟通的途径。”
这并不是一个简单的事。在此之前，伯南克从来没有管理过如此大的组织，除了新泽西州的镇上的中学和普林斯顿大学的经济管理学院。伯南克并没有过多的经验可以借鉴，但是他在适应期所做的努力调整还是有目共睹的。如果美国经济还是继续学样子，那么这些情人节的问候还会源源不断的飞过来的。
The phrases “Federal Reserve Bank” and “Valentine’s Day” haven’t appeared in too many sentences together. But this is the social-media age, and so it was perhaps inevitable that someone in the Twitterverse started a thread for people to send valentines to the Fed. “When I see your yield curves,” one tweeter wrote, “I get too big to fail.”
They got a huge kick out of it in that mysterious building down on Constitution Avenue, where jocularity and love are more typically in short supply. Not long before Valentine’s Day, Fed chairman Ben Bernanke was up on Capitol Hill for another of his ritualistic lecture sessions from Republican lawmakers. House Budget Committee Chairman Paul Ryan badgered him about inflation (which does not exist now, but which Ryan and many other Republicans swear is coming in a big way). Another Republican upbraided him over a recent Fed report on the housing market that the lawmaker said stepped on Congress’s toes. All this is to say nothing of the more visceral hatred Bernanke and the bank have inspired: those lusty chants of “End the Fed!” heard at Ron Paul rallies.
Dig beneath the level of political white noise, though, and you hear a different story—about a modest and even shy man who is one of Washington’s quiet heroes. Bernanke’s defenders insist that he has pursued surprising and bold policies in the face of scorching political opposition. “I think he’s going to go down as one of the most creative chairs of the Fed ever,” says Jared Bernstein, formerly Vice President Biden’s chief economist.
When President Bush made him chair in 2006, Bernanke was a typical moderate-to-conservative Republican who was initially regarded as too academic and cautious. He understood macroeconomics, but he didn’t have a great grasp of markets, some said, and he didn’t get politics at all. Then the crisis hit. (Note: my sister, Susan Tomasky, is a director of the Cleveland Fed.)
There are critics, mostly on the left, who think Bernanke was way too slow to see what was happening. “As someone who’d sat on the Fed since the summer of 2002, he could hardly have been excused for not having seen the housing bubble before the summer of 2007,” says the liberal economist Dean Baker, one of the few who did predict it all.
Other economists cut him more slack because the country was in such an unprecedented situation. “It wasn’t possible to follow the existing rule book,” says Michael Woodford of Columbia University. Bernanke brought to the situation one key tool, though: his deep study in his academic years of the Depression. “The Fed of the 1930s,” Bernanke told Newsweek, “took a very conservative approach, and it failed.” And so this Republican came to admire FDR’s “willingness to be bold and to go beyond orthodox prescriptions”—like taking the country off the gold standard and establishing deposit insurance.
The steps Bernanke took—low interest rates and quantitative easing to increase the money supply—are now well known. The extent of the intervention perhaps less so, but consider this fact: the Obama stimulus bill that remains so controversial had a price tag of about $800 billion. The Fed has pumped around $2 trillion into the economy in stimulus. And it has made money while doing it, last year contributing $77 billion in remittances to the U.S. Treasury (pre-crisis remittances typically ran around $30 billion).
The criticisms of Bernanke aren’t without substance: conservatives don’t like monetary stimulus any more than they like the legislative version. But often the attacks boil down to the idea that Bernanke’s policies are helping dig President Obama out of a hole. “The right wing is attacking things the Fed does that are clearly in the national interest,” says Barney Frank, the leading Democrat in the House on Fed matters. “They are frustrated because Bernanke is supposed to be one of their guys. Some of them think, Why is Bernanke doing this?”
Fed watchers rate Bernanke highly on other counts. Most are impressed with the transparency he’s brought to the notoriously secretive institution. There is open dissent now at Federal Open Market Committee meetings, something that didn’t happen much under Alan Greenspan. “He changed the way the FOMC is run and the way it communicates with the public,” says Donald Kohn, a former Fed vice chair who worked under Bernanke until 2010.
It hasn’t been an easy ride. Before becoming the chair of the Fed, Bernanke had never run anything more consequential than a township school board in New Jersey and the Princeton economics department. He’s had a steep learning curve, but most observers have been impressed by the way Bernanke has adapted to trying times. Now if the economy continues to follow suit, those Fed valentines will keep on coming.
