Former Federal Reserve chairman Alan Greenspan — 60 Minutes Archive

[00:00:00] Speaker 1: "60 Minutes Rewind" Alan Greenspan may go down as one of the best chairman of the Federal Reserve in American history. His 18-year tenure was marked by unprecedented economic growth, budget surpluses, and a booming stock market. And he was praised universally for shepherding the economy through the shock of 9/11. Now he's written his memoir, The Age of Turbulence, which comes out just as he's coming under fire, something he's not used to, for today's housing and lending crises. His critics say he established a pattern of bailing out Wall Street investors. Greenspan sat down with us for his first major interview, defending himself against the criticism that he should have done something to stop the shady practices in subprime lending. In a rare admission, he told us he missed its significance. If you knew these practices were going on, and even maybe just suspected that there was something illegal or shady, why didn't you speak out? You had a huge megaphone. People really listened to Alan Greenspan. [00:01:10] Speaker 2: Well, I was aware a lot of these practices were going on. I had no notion of how significant they had become until very late. I didn't really get it until very late in 2005 and 2006. [00:01:26] Speaker 1: But others at the Fed did get it that banks and mortgage companies had already signed up millions of home buyers and speculators, many with poor credit, for so-called subprime mortgages with complicated interest rate adjustments that have led to record numbers of defaults. Some of the practices were fraudulent. One of your former Fed governors, Ed Gramlich, said that he proposed that the Fed examine these lending practices and look into them to see if something could be done, and that you rejected that idea. Why did you reject it? [00:02:01] Speaker 2: Well, I thought that one would not be capable of doing what he was suggesting. [00:02:10] Speaker 1: What, of sitting on them, taking some regulations? [00:02:13] Speaker 2: Well, I think not. [00:02:15] Speaker 1: Even if you even looked into it? [00:02:17] Speaker 2: Well, there's nothing to look into, particularly, because we knew that there was a number of such practices going up. But it's very difficult to -- for banking regulators to deal with that. [00:02:34] Speaker 1: JUDY WOODRUFF: He insists there's nothing he could have done to prevent today's plummeting home prices and the fact that a million families have lost their homes and many more could. But some economists now say Greenspan actually created the housing bubble and the credit crunch by keeping interest rates too low for too long. [00:02:54] Speaker 2: Just remember, we raised interest rates at every meeting from June of 2004 till I got out of office. [00:03:06] Speaker 1: JUDY WOODRUFF: You raised rates in 2004, but only after you held interest rates at historically low levels for three years while the bubble, the housing bubble, was forming. And then you had 13 rate cuts in that period of time. [00:03:23] Speaker 2: It was our job to unfreeze the American banking system if we wanted the economy to function. This required that we keep rates modestly low. [00:03:33] Speaker 1: JUDY WOODRUFF: But some of the Fed governors who worked with you at the time are now saying that they think interest rates were too low for too long. JUDY WOODRUFF: I think they are mistaken. JUDY WOODRUFF: What this shows is how certain he is about his views and how firmly he guided the Fed when he was chairman and dealt with shocks to the financial markets by quickly lowering interest rates. Now, in the current turmoil, investors are calling on his successor, Ben Bernanke, to do what Greenspan would have done. JUDY WOODRUFF: The sense is you would have acted sooner. You would have thrown more cash and liquidity into the system. You would have acted faster and more dramatically. [00:04:13] Speaker 2: BEN BERNANKE: I'm not sure that's true. And let me tell you why. We were dealing in an environment back there where inflation was easing. So we could move sooner without the fear of stoking inflationary pressures. You can't do that anymore. And therefore, it's a different world. I'm not certain that I would have done anything different were I there or -- [00:04:38] Speaker 1: JUDY WOODRUFF: So you don't think you would have acted any faster? [00:04:40] Speaker 2: BEN BERNANKE: I doubt it. [00:04:41] Speaker 1: JUDY WOODRUFF: So you don't see any light between you and what Mr. Bernanke is doing? [00:04:45] Speaker 2: BEN BERNANKE: I think he's doing an excellent job. [00:04:48] Speaker 1: JUDY WOODRUFF: The CEOs of Ford and Chrysler are begging the Fed to lower rates. I mean, on their hands and knees. [00:04:55] Speaker 2: BEN BERNANKE: I would suggest that they focus on selling -- creating better cars for their customers. [00:05:02] Speaker 1: JUDY WOODRUFF: The current criticism of his time at the Fed notwithstanding. Do you miss coming to work here? JUDY WOODRUFF: Alan Greenspan guided the economy through the jolt of 9/11 and presided over an unprecedented stretch of 10 years without a recession. When he retired in 2006 at age 79, he was considered almost infallible. JUDY WOODRUFF: Now that you are out of government and making real money, I'm wondering how you're investing. Are you investing in real estate? [00:05:32] Speaker 2: BEN BERNANKE: There are certain questions I never thought you would ask but knew that if you did, I wouldn't answer and you just hit one of them. JUDY WOODRUFF: What about the stock market? [00:05:40] Speaker 1: BEN BERNANKE: I'd just as soon not comment. JUDY WOODRUFF: But that's what everybody wants to know. BEN BERNANKE: I'm sure they do. JUDY WOODRUFF: I tried again later by asking about his book advance, reportedly $8 million. JUDY WOODRUFF: Well, if you could be paid in any currency in the whole world, what would you like to be paid in? [00:06:00] Speaker 2: BEN BERNANKE: Well, as an economist, I would say I couldn't care less because I could immediately convert it in the exchange markets to whatever currency. [00:06:06] Speaker 1: JUDY WOODRUFF: So it doesn't matter. BEN BERNANKE: No. JUDY WOODRUFF: Euros, dollars, dinars, it's all the same to you? [00:06:10] Speaker 2: BEN BERNANKE: Key question, basically, is in what currency do you wish to hold your assets? [00:06:15] Speaker 1: JUDY WOODRUFF: Okay. [00:06:16] Speaker 2: BEN BERNANKE: And what I've done is I diversify. JUDY WOODRUFF: Answer. [00:06:20] Speaker 1: JUDY WOODRUFF: Oh, you do, even in terms of currency? BEN BERNANKE: Yeah. JUDY WOODRUFF: Not a surprise, he wouldn't say which currencies he's holding. JUDY WOODRUFF: That's a nice picture. JUDY WOODRUFF: What is a surprise is how personal and chatty his book is. By his own admission, the age of turbulence is a psychoanalysis of himself. And analyzed this, he wrote it in longhand in a pretty unusual place. JUDY WOODRUFF: Is it true that you wrote this in the bathtub? [00:06:47] Speaker 2: BEN BERNANKE: Eighty percent of it? Yeah. [00:06:50] Speaker 1: JUDY WOODRUFF: Greenspan pokes fun at himself, especially in the telling of his romance with NBC newswoman Andrea Mitchell, who's 21 years younger than he is. On their first date in 1984, they had dinner, and he invited her back to his apartment for a bit of romantic reading. JUDY WOODRUFF: Would you believe he did want to show me an essay he had written about what? [00:07:14] Speaker 2: BEN BERNANKE: This is antitrust. JUDY WOODRUFF: Antitrust. [00:07:17] Speaker 1: JUDY WOODRUFF: Monopolies. [00:07:18] Speaker 2: BEN BERNANKE: Monopolies. [00:07:19] Speaker 1: BEN BERNANKE: Monopolies. [00:07:20] Speaker 2: BEN BERNANKE: On the Sherman Antitrust Act of 1890. JUDY WOODRUFF: You know how to woo a girl. [00:07:23] Speaker 1: BEN BERNANKE: What's even worse? BEN BERNANKE: It worked. JUDY WOODRUFF: It worked. BEN BERNANKE: They dated for 13 years before he finally popped the question. [00:07:31] Speaker 2: BEN BERNANKE: I hinted at it several different times. [00:07:33] Speaker 1: BEN BERNANKE: He used fed speak. BEN BERNANKE: It was -- who knew he was proposing? BEN BERNANKE: I couldn't figure it out. BEN BERNANKE: Oh, and for their honeymoon, he took her to an international monetary conference. BEN BERNANKE: His wonkiness and love of statistics go back to when he was a little boy in Depression-era New York City, when he collected railroad timetables, learned Morse code, and memorized baseball stats. BEN BERNANKE: You're what we would call today a geek. BEN BERNANKE: You're a geek back then. BEN BERNANKE: Yeah. [00:08:06] Speaker 2: BEN BERNANKE: So, you know, like some people, you know, love reading murder mysteries. BEN BERNANKE: Yeah. BEN BERNANKE: I loved reading that stuff. [00:08:12] Speaker 1: BEN BERNANKE: And yet, he spent a good part of his young life trying to be anything but an economist. His first dream was to be a professional baseball player. BEN BERNANKE: Because when I was 12 and younger, I could hit a curveball. BEN BERNANKE: We went to a game in Washington the other day, and he showed me how he still fills out the scorecard. BEN BERNANKE: It's probably the original fed speak. BEN BERNANKE: It wasn't his curveball, but his handling of the economy. [00:08:40] Speaker 2: BEN BERNANKE: I got to tell you, we miss you. [00:08:42] Speaker 1: BEN BERNANKE: That had people at the game lining up to get his autograph on dollar bills. [00:08:46] Speaker 2: BEN BERNANKE: If it wasn't for him, I wouldn't have a house right now. [00:08:49] Speaker 1: BEN BERNANKE: Professional ball didn't work out. So what then? [00:08:53] Speaker 2: BEN BERNANKE: I was going to be a professional musician. [00:08:55] Speaker 1: BEN BERNANKE: Alan Greenspan, jazz band. That's going to surprise people. BEN BERNANKE: Greenspan was a good enough saxophonist in high school that, instead of going right off to college, he was hired by the popular Henry Jerome Orchestra and traveled the country playing bebop jazz. At 17, he was hardly Mr. Cool, while the other band members smoked pot and drank booze between sets. He read books about the British stock market. BEN BERNANKE: You're sitting over here by the side reading? [00:09:26] Speaker 2: BEN BERNANKE: I'm in another room sitting there reading a book. [00:09:31] Speaker 1: BEN BERNANKE: You said you ended up doing their income taxes. [00:09:34] Speaker 2: BEN BERNANKE: True, yes. [00:09:36] Speaker 1: In the end, he became an economist with his own forecasting firm in New York in the 1950s. That's when he became friends with philosopher Ayn Rand, author of Atlas Shrugged. BEN BERNANKE: Was this hot off the press when she gave it to you? [00:09:52] Speaker 2: BEN BERNANKE: Oh, yeah. It was still warm when I read it. [00:09:55] Speaker 1: BEN BERNANKE: Yeah? BEN BERNANKE: Rand advocated a doctrine of unfettered, unregulated capitalism. And Greenspan was one of her most famous disciples. Though, in a twist of fate, he'd later become the nation's top banking regulator. BEN BERNANKE: Do you know what her nickname of you was? BEN BERNANKE: The Undertaker. [00:10:12] Speaker 2: BEN BERNANKE: The Undertaker. [00:10:13] Speaker 1: BEN BERNANKE: The Undertaker. She thought you radiated gloom. But Rand also thought that you were too much of a social climber. [00:10:21] Speaker 2: BEN BERNANKE: I don't know how to respond to that. Everybody is a social climber, if you want to put it in one way or another. I mean, and the reason that we fundamentally is inbred in all of us is the need to get the approval of others. And the ultimate form of getting approval is climbing socially. BEN BERNANKE: So guilty. BEN BERNANKE: I'm guilty, but then the problem is that there is no non-guilties out there. [00:10:47] Speaker 1: BEN BERNANKE: After years of silence or obtuseness about policies and the people he worked with in Washington, Alan Greenspan opens up in his book, revealing his personal feelings about the six presidents he knew and worked for, starting with Richard Nixon. BEN BERNANKE: Here's what you say in the book, that he was so profane it would have made Tony Soprano blush. [00:11:11] Speaker 2: It was that bad? BEN BERNANKE: Oh, indeed. He sits down in the group, and within the first 30 seconds, utters more four-letter words than I had heard in the music business. And I said, there's something extraordinarily wrong here, that there were two Nixons. [00:11:30] Speaker 1: BEN BERNANKE: Greenspan writes that Nixon was anti-Semitic, anti-Italian, anti-Greek, anti-Slovak. I don't know anybody. He was pro. And Gerald Ford? BEN BERNANKE: Extraordinary human being. [00:11:41] Speaker 2: BEN BERNANKE: But he wasn't the smartest, you say? [00:11:43] Speaker 1: BEN BERNANKE: No, he was not the smartest, but he was the most normal. [00:11:48] Speaker 2: BEN BERNANKE: And that's what you ended up admiring, the normality. BEN BERNANKE: Well, it was also the ethical base of the man. We'd be discussing policy, and he says, let's forget some of the facts. It's just the right thing to do for the economy. [00:12:04] Speaker 1: BEN BERNANKE: And the other presidents didn't focus to that extent? BEN BERNANKE: Yeah. BEN BERNANKE: Of Ronald Reagan, he said he had an odd form of intelligence, which he used to improve the country's self-image. He writes that he had a, quote, "terrible relationship" with the first President George Bush, who pressured Greenspan publicly. [00:12:24] Speaker 2: BEN BERNANKE: And interest rates should be lower now. BEN BERNANKE: I was shocked because nobody talked about Federal Reserve policy in public. BEN BERNANKE: Was what they did improper? BEN BERNANKE: Oh, indeed, yes. [00:12:40] Speaker 1: BEN BERNANKE: Impro-- they crossed a line, in your view. [00:12:42] Speaker 2: BEN BERNANKE: Well, if you have, as we do by statute, an independent Federal Reserve, it clearly is in opposition to what the purpose of the law was. [00:12:51] Speaker 1: BEN BERNANKE: President Bush later said it was Greenspan's fault he lost the election in '92 to Bill Clinton. Clinton was the only Democrat Greenspan served under. And he says the smartest of all the presidents he knew. [00:13:04] Speaker 2: BEN BERNANKE: Even though I clearly was a Republican, I had to admit that he was an extraordinarily effective president. [00:13:11] Speaker 1: BEN BERNANKE: You seem to have gotten along with him best of all your presidents. BEN BERNANKE: That's right. [00:13:16] Speaker 2: BEN BERNANKE: I mean, you-- BEN BERNANKE: The bottom line is what he called our relationship when he said, we, I think, are the odd couple. [00:13:24] Speaker 1: BEN BERNANKE: I asked what he thought of Hillary. BEN BERNANKE: Very smart. [00:13:28] Speaker 2: She and I got along reasonably well. [00:13:33] Speaker 1: BEN BERNANKE: Do you think she can handle the presidency? BEN BERNANKE: Certainly. [00:13:36] Speaker 2: Well, I think she's unquestionably capable. The question is, is she the best person for the job? BEN BERNANKE: And? BEN BERNANKE: My tendency would be to vote Republican. [00:13:48] Speaker 1: BEN BERNANKE: We all know that when Chairman Greenspan talks, the world listens. BEN BERNANKE: He got so close to Clinton and his economic team that he began visiting the White House as often as once a month, something his predecessors had not done. BEN BERNANKE: What was going on? [00:14:03] Speaker 2: BEN BERNANKE: Well, I was basically being an economic consultant, which was-- [00:14:07] Speaker 1: BEN BERNANKE: But is that proper for the Fed chairman to become an economic consultant of the administration, given the need for the appearance of total independence? [00:14:17] Speaker 2: BEN BERNANKE: We are one government. The Federal Reserve is not the foreign enemy. I was very knowledgeable about lots of different subjects. [00:14:26] Speaker 1: BEN BERNANKE: But you were influencing the policy. [00:14:30] Speaker 2: BEN BERNANKE: I hope I was. [00:14:32] Speaker 1: BEN BERNANKE: That was behind the scenes. In public, Greenspan was inscrutable whenever Congress asked about interest rates. He resorted to an indecipherable Delphic dialect, known as fedspeak. [00:14:45] Speaker 2: BEN BERNANKE: I would engage in some form of syntax destruction, which sounded as though I were answering the question, but in fact, had not. BEN BERNANKE: We showed him a tape of him at a hearing. BEN BERNANKE: Modest, preemptive actions can obviate the need of more drastic actions at a later date, and that could destabilize the economy. BEN BERNANKE: Very profound. BEN BERNANKE: Very profound. [00:15:15] Speaker 1: BEN BERNANKE: It makes you-- BEN BERNANKE: Impenetrably profound. BEN BERNANKE: In other words-- BEN BERNANKE: And so you worked on these, right? BEN BERNANKE: Oh, of course. BEN BERNANKE: You worked on making it even more-- BEN BERNANKE: But what would often happen is you'd get two newspapers with opposing headlines coming out of the same hearing. BEN BERNANKE: I succeeded. [00:15:29] Speaker 2: BEN BERNANKE: I succeeded. [00:15:30] Speaker 1: BEN BERNANKE: Chairman Allen became Saint Allen during the robust Clinton years, getting much of the credit for the booming economy, budget surpluses, and soaring markets. BEN BERNANKE: You became a rock star. BEN BERNANKE: You did, Saint Allen. BEN BERNANKE: People were coming up to you in the street, as I understand it-- BEN BERNANKE: Tell me if this is true-- thanking you for the growth in their 401ks. BEN BERNANKE: Yeah, I know. BEN BERNANKE: Wall Street, whose profits soared during his tenure, loved Greenspan, too. BEN BERNANKE: They called him "Easy Al" for his tendency to slash rates and make money cheap when the markets went down. BEN BERNANKE: Greenspan's most criticized move as Fed chair came at the start of George Bush's term when he supported tax reductions. BEN BERNANKE: His testimony, while careful, was read as an endorsement of Bush's massive tax cuts. [00:16:20] Speaker 2: BEN BERNANKE: Having a tax cut in place may, in fact, do noticeable good. [00:16:25] Speaker 1: BEN BERNANKE: Greenspan had been saying that the surplus should be used to shore up Social Security and Medicare, but he writes that he came to favor a tax cut because he thought without one, the surplus would get too large. BEN BERNANKE: Yeah, but why didn't you think that Congress would never have allowed it to get that far? Why wouldn't you think they would spend it on education, on bridges, on roads, or whatever they did? [00:16:49] Speaker 2: BEN BERNANKE: Because they could have, and the numbers were still large enough. So I never explicitly stated that I was in favor of the Bush tax cut. BEN BERNANKE: That's what the Bush administration interpreted, but I never said -- I was in favor of a tax cut. [00:17:08] Speaker 1: BEN BERNANKE: Several newspapers, when you testified, said that this was -- that you'd done this for political reasons, that you did it to, you know, win the hearts of the Bush people. BEN BERNANKE: Did you succumb to pressure from the White House? [00:17:19] Speaker 2: BEN BERNANKE: No, not at all. BEN BERNANKE: Did you -- BEN BERNANKE: They never spoke to me about this. I mean, look, you can only say what you believe. I went back over that testimony. And I must tell you, I would not change a word of it. [00:17:32] Speaker 1: BEN BERNANKE: Even knowing the outcome? BEN BERNANKE: Yeah, yeah. [00:17:34] Speaker 2: BEN BERNANKE: The outcome? [00:17:35] Speaker 1: The surplus evaporated and the deficits returned. Greenspan had proposed that in that case, the Bush administration adjust and trim back the tax cuts. But that never happened. [00:17:47] Speaker 2: BEN BERNANKE: Well, remember that their economic policy largely was to take the proposals made during the campaign, when there was a prospective very large surplus, and that those policies continued in place irrespective of what was happening to the surplus. [00:18:06] Speaker 1: BEN BERNANKE: Well, that's very rigid. [00:18:08] Speaker 2: BEN BERNANKE: I don't know if it was rigid. It was wrong. [00:18:10] Speaker 1: BEN BERNANKE: Greenspan says he was especially surprised and disappointed by his old friend Dick Cheney. [00:18:17] Speaker 2: BEN BERNANKE: He was much less focused on restraining spending than I would have liked. [00:18:25] Speaker 1: BEN BERNANKE: Well, actually, Cheney has said deficits don't matter. [00:18:29] Speaker 2: BEN BERNANKE: Well, I think he was mistaken on that. [00:18:31] Speaker 1: BEN BERNANKE: So these are your new offices. BEN BERNANKE: Greenspan is out of government now for the first time in 20 years. He set up an economic forecasting firm, Greenspan Associates, and he predicts the current fear sweeping the markets will subside. BEN BERNANKE: Do you think that this is really going to have deep lasting effect throughout the economy, jobs, consumer spending? [00:18:55] Speaker 2: BEN BERNANKE: It's not clear yet, and it will not be clear for quite a while. BEN BERNANKE: This is fundamentally originally caused by the flattening out of home prices. BEN BERNANKE: And that is only now just beginning. BEN BERNANKE: Well... BEN BERNANKE: Prices are going to fall further. [00:19:13] Speaker 1: BEN BERNANKE: Well, what we've already begun to see is not just that housing prices are falling, but that it's affecting the job market for anything related to housing, including real estate, including the sales of appliances and furniture. [00:19:27] Speaker 2: BEN BERNANKE: But there is an underlying strength in the United States. And indeed, when you look around the world, even with this extraordinary credit problem, the economies seem to be holding up. For the moment, it does not look sufficiently severe that it will spiral into anything deeper. We're going to get through this particular credit crunch. We always do. BEN BERNANKE: This is a human behavior phenomenon, and it will pass. The fever will break, and euphoria will start to come back again. [00:20:06] Speaker 1: BEN BERNANKE: But he does see clouds on the horizon. [00:20:09] Speaker 2: BEN BERNANKE: Over the long run, this is not going to be what our problem is. Our problem over the long run is the reemergence of inflation. [00:20:18] Speaker 1: BEN BERNANKE: This is interesting, because in your book, your outlook on the broad future is pretty gloomy. BEN BERNANKE: Interest rates going up, you say? BEN BERNANKE: Yes. BEN BERNANKE: Inflation going up? [00:20:28] Speaker 2: BEN BERNANKE: Yes. Indeed, I, in fact, have a line in the book saying this looks pretty gloomy. [00:20:33] Speaker 1: BEN BERNANKE: When he was chairman, his public statements had enormous impact. He's finding out they still do. In February, he rattled the markets by predicting there was a one in three chance of a recession this year. It forced the current chairman, Ben Bernanke, to try and calm things down and raise questions about the propriety of his speaking out. [00:20:56] Speaker 2: BEN BERNANKE: This isn't like any normal forecaster going public. BEN BERNANKE: So I then become incarcerated and I'm not allowed to do anything because I might say something? [00:21:06] Speaker 1: BEN BERNANKE: What is your responsibility? Let's put it in those terms. [00:21:09] Speaker 2: BEN BERNANKE: My responsibility is what I am doing now. I'm not commenting on monetary policy. I'm commenting on global things. [00:21:15] Speaker 1: BEN BERNANKE: Yeah, but the comment that has most people upset was your prediction about a recession, that you shouldn't be commenting on recession inflation. [00:21:23] Speaker 2: BEN BERNANKE: But how am I going to pursue my profession without doing precisely that? [00:21:28] Speaker 1: BEN BERNANKE: Well, you know, sometimes people in Congress have this rule that they can't work in related fields or can't become a lobbyist for X amount of time. Should there be a respite here? [00:21:39] Speaker 2: BEN BERNANKE: There was. For a year, I was not allowed to go lobby the Fed, which I had never done, haven't done. [00:21:47] Speaker 1: BEN BERNANKE: No, no, I mean about speaking. [00:21:49] Speaker 2: BEN BERNANKE: Yeah. There's no restriction on speaking. BEN BERNANKE: Should there be? [00:21:52] Speaker 1: BEN BERNANKE: No. BEN BERNANKE: Should you impose one yourself? BEN BERNANKE: No. BEN BERNANKE: When he's not working these days, he does what he's always done to relax. Yep, he flips through government reports with all those geeky numbers. BEN BERNANKE: He loves these data. I mean, look at the stuff here. BEN BERNANKE: Oh, quite. BEN BERNANKE: This is his stuff. BEN BERNANKE: This is his morning reading. BEN BERNANKE: This is his Bureau of Labor Statistics, Productivity and Cause. BEN BERNANKE: This is your sit down over the cup of coffee in the morning. [00:22:18] Speaker 2: BEN BERNANKE: Oh, yeah. I just loved getting into the detail of, say, protein content, of hard red winter wheat was, because the differential in price-- [00:22:29] Speaker 1: BEN BERNANKE: Yes. [00:22:30] Speaker 2: BEN BERNANKE: The differential in price between-- BEN BERNANKE: It's very romantic. BEN BERNANKE: --Kansas City and Chicago was relevant. BEN BERNANKE: It was romantic to me. That's what the joke is. BEN BERNANKE: And I'm still that way. I mean, I just love that stuff. BEN BERNANKE: He is still that way. [00:22:44] Speaker ?: BEN BERNANKE: He is still that way. BEN BERNANKE: He is still that way. BEN BERNANKE: He is still that way. BEN BERNANKE: He is still that way. BEN BERNANKE: He is still that way. BEN BERNANKE: He is still that way.