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Bernanke tells U.K.’s King: We saved our economies

Published: Dec 29, 2014 1:04 p.m. ET

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Former Fed Chairman Ben Bernanke: No point to economics unless the knowledge is used to “make the world better.”

By

JeffryBartash

Reporter

WASHINGTON (MarketWatch) ) — Former Federal Reserve Chairman Ben Bernanke believes history has already vindicated the novel efforts of the U.S. central bank to revive the economy after the financial crisis of 2008.
The Fed and the Bank of England offered financial aid to beleaguered banks and deployed tools such as quantitative easing — creating new money — on a massive scale to help heal badly damaged economies.
The result has been that the U.S. and Britain have grown much faster than the European Union, whose response has been less aggressive.

‘By stabilizing the financial system, we avoided much, much worse persistently bad consequences for our economies.’

Ben Bernanke

“By stabilizing the financial system, we avoided much, much worse, persistently bad consequences for our economies,” Bernanke said in an interview with Mervyn King on BBC. King was head of the Bank of England during the crisis and was a constant ally of Bernanke, a longtime friend whom he had first met at MIT three decades earlier.