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Episode 768: A Chat With Ben Bernanke

Former Federal Reserve Chairman Ben Bernanke.
Katie Kramer
/
NBCU Photo Bank via Getty Images
Former Federal Reserve Chairman Ben Bernanke.

Today on the show, we sit down with Dr. Ben Bernanke, the medicine man of the markets and the money supply.

Ten years later, we're still dealing with the effects of the 2008 financial crisis. Some industries and parts of the country are still trying to recover from the worst economic period since the Great Depression.

It was Ben Bernanke's job to stop the crashing and pick up the pieces.

As chairman of the Federal Reserve, he had to balance the pressures of Congress, the White House, and the American people and come up with a solution to rebuild confidence in the country's financial system. He had to make tough call after tough call.

He's had 10 years to think it over on what happened, what could have happened and why. So, we sat down with him to ask a few questions, like:

  • Why didn't the Fed see this coming?
  • Why did America bail out the banks, and not the homeowners?
  • How close did we come to total collapse?
  • And we ask him about his trip to Hollywood.
  • Music: "Anthem Summer" and "See The Future." Find us: Twitter/ Facebook.

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    Copyright 2021 NPR. To see more, visit https://www.npr.org.

    Stacey Vanek Smith is the co-host of NPR's The Indicator from Planet Money. She's also a correspondent for Planet Money, where she covers business and economics. In this role, Smith has followed economic stories down the muddy back roads of Oklahoma to buy 100 barrels of oil; she's traveled to Pune, India, to track down the man who pitched the country's dramatic currency devaluation to the prime minister; and she's spoken with a North Korean woman who made a small fortune smuggling artificial sweetener in from China.