Thedailybeast.com’s Charlie Gasparino wrote an article last night arguing that “the person who really turned around the economy wasn’t Ben Bernanke.”
Charlie’s piece is a response to Time magazine’s anointment of Federal Reserve Chairman Ben Bernanke as its “Person of the Year.”
From the article:
“As he [Volcker] recently told The Wall Street Journal’s Alan Murry: ‘I have found very little evidence that vast amounts of innovation in financial markets in recent years have had a visible effect on the productivity of the economy. Maybe you can show me that I am wrong.” He continues, “All I know is that the economy was rising very nicely in the 1950s and 1960s, without all of these innovations. Indeed, it was quite good in the 1980s without credit-default swaps and without secularization and without CDOs.”
What does Volcker think the most important financial innovation has been in the last two decades? The ATM:
“The most important financial innovation that I have seen the past 20 years is the automatic teller machine … How many other innovations can you tell me that have been as important to the individual as the automatic teller machine, which is in fact more of a mechanical innovation than a financial one?”
You can read the piece here.