Six Things We Learned from Bernanke’s Testimony

Years ago, while attending an economics conference, I heard someone—I think it was Richard Freeman, of Harvard, but I couldn’t swear to it—respond to a presentation by saying that it hadn’t cleared up the issue at hand but that it had improved the quality of our ignorance. Two days of testimony on Capitol Hill from Ben Bernanke, the Fed chairman, has accomplished something similar. At the end of it, we still don’t know for sure where Fed policy, and the global markets that depend upon it, will go from here. But we have learned some valuable things. Here are six of them:

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