US Federal Reserve Chairman Ben Bernanke won confirmation on Thursday to a second term as the US central banker, despite sharp attacks on his role before the 2008 financial meltdown and in its aftermath.
After a bitter debate that roiled global stock markets, the US Senate voted 70-30 to approve Bernanke after easily dispatching an effort to block the nomination days before his term was to expire tomorrow.
US President Barack Obama declared himself “gratified” by the vote and said Bernanke was needed because “while the worst of the storm has passed, its devastation remains and we have a lot of work to do to rebuild our economy.”
Opposition to Bernanke — who drew a historic number of “no” votes — had led Obama and top aides to work the telephones to court wavering senators gripped by election-year populist pressures over the battered US economy.
His supporters said the central banker, 56, had pulled the world’s richest economy back from the brink of a collapse like the Great Depression of the 1930s — though many also noted he had not done enough to prevent the crisis.
Bernanke’s “performance in addressing the economic crisis and his current efforts to significantly enhance financial regulation to help prevent future crises outweigh his past mistakes,” Democratic Senator Carl Levin said.
However, some Democrats and independent Senator Bernie Sanders, arguably the chamber’s most left-leaning member, charged that Bernanke had crafted disastrous economic policies under former US president George W. Bush, missed the signs of the coming crisis and then placed the needs of Wall Street above Main Street.
Sanders argued the Senate should not “say to somebody who was asleep at the switch in terms of regulating our financial institutions: ‘Congratulations, you failed, there’s a major recession, you’re getting reappointed!’”
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