That simply fails to jive with reality. Hoover took many actions, most of them disastrous. These actions include raising taxes to balance the budget and signing the Smoot-Hawley tariff laws, throwing a monkey into international trade just when the global economy was crumbling in the early 1930s.

Also, the famous story that Mellon declared that everything from capital to labor to plant and machinery should be liquidated is highly suspect, though Bernanke never asserted as much. It is fair to say Hoover and Mellon were completely flummoxed by the Great Depression and didn't respond productively.

What the audience saw was that Bernanke was an incredbly intelligent and polite Southern gentleman with agreat sense of humor. He praised presidents Bush and Obama for having the guts to make very unpopular decisions.

When it came to the votes on TARP—the first of which was defeated—Bernanke recalled a conversation with a member of Congress he knew. The Fed chairman called to ask what the congressman was hearing from his constitutants about bailing out Wall Street banks. "Fifty percent say no," the congressmen told him. "The other 50% say hell, no."

 

 

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