Friday, March 23, 2012

Federal Reserve Chairman Ben Bernanke says the slow recovery from the Great Recession and 2008 financial crisis illustrates how vulnerable the global economy is and urged economic policymakers to learn from that lesson.

Bernanke told a two-day conference on the crisis that the Federal Reserve and other central banks took extraordinary steps to stabilize financial systems.

The Fed purchased more than $2 trillion in bonds to try and push long-term interest rates lower. The effort was aimed at encouraging lending and borrowing. It has been criticized for those purchases but Bernanke has defended them as successfully working to protect an even more severe economic downturn.

Bernanke said he believed academic research would help shape future central bank policies.