We did stop the meltdown. We avoided what would have been, I think, a collapse of the global financial system. That was obviously a good thing. But one thing that I was always sure of and the Federal Reserve was always sure of was that a collapse of some of these big financial firms was going to have very serious collateral consequences. There were people arguing even as late as September 2008, Well, why don't you just let the firms collapse? There is a system that can take care of it: bankruptcy. Why don't you let them fail? We never thought that was a good option. Particularly, if the whole system had collapsed, we would have had extraordinarily serious consequences.

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About Ben Bernanke

Ben Bernanke was a contemporary American economist. Ben Shalom Bernanke is an American economist who served as the 14th chairman of the Federal Reserve from 2006 to 2014. After leaving the Federal Reserve, he was appointed a distinguished fellow at the Brookings Institution. Read more on Wikipedia →

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