Note to Ben Bernanke: Beware the Ides of Time

Congratulations to Fed chairman Ben Bernanke on being selected as Time magazine's Person of the Year. As I've said numerous times, I think the Fed did a terrible job in the period from 2002 to 2007, pumping up the property bubble with its low-interest-rate policy, going AWOL on the regulatory front, and chronically underestimating the dangers that the subprime bust represented to the rest of the economy. But once Bernanke and his colleagues grasped the scale of the problem—that realization...