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Home > News & Events > 2009 Speeches
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Chairman Ben S. Bernanke
At the Federal Reserve Bank of Kansas City's Annual Economic Symposium,
Jackson Hole, Wyoming
Chairman Bernanke delivered the same remarks at the Brookings Institution,on September 15, 2009
August 21, 2009
Reflections on a Year of CrisisBy the standards of recent decades, the economic environment at the time of thissymposium one year ago was quite challenging. A year after the onset of the currentcrisis in August 2007, financial markets remained stressed, the economy was slowing,
and inflation--driven by a global commodity boom--had risen significantly. What wecould not fully appreciate when we last gathered here was that the economic andpolicy environment was about to become vastly more difficult. In the weeks thatfollowed, several systemically critical financial institutions would either fail or comeclose to failure, activity in some key financial markets would virtually cease, and theglobal economy would enter a deep recession. My remarks this morning will focus onthe extraordinary financial and economic events of the past year, as well as on thepolicy responses both in the United States and abroad.One very clear lesson of the past year--no surprise, of course, to any student ofeconomic history, but worth noting nonetheless--is that a full-blown financial crisis canexact an enormous toll in both human and economic terms. A second lesson--onceagain, familiar to economic historians--is that financial disruptions do not respectborders. The crisis has been global, with no major country having been immune.
History is full of examples in which the policy responses to financial crises have beenslow and inadequate, often resulting ultimately in greater economic damage andincreased fiscal costs. In this episode, by contrast, policymakers in the United Statesand around the globe responded with speed and force to arrest a rapidly deterioratingand dangerous situation. Looking forward, we must urgently address structuralweaknesses in the financial system, in particular in the regulatory framework, toensurehttps://www.51lunwen.org
that the enormous costs of the past two years will not be borne again.September-October 2008: The Crisis IntensifiesWhen we met last year, financial markets and the economy were continuing to sufferthe effects of the ongoing crisis. We know now that the National Bureau of EconomicResearch has determined December 2007 as the beginning of the recession. TheU.S. unemployment rate had risen to 5-3/4 percent by July, about 1 percentage pointabove its level at the beginning of the crisis, and household spending was weakening.
Ongoing declines in residential construction and house prices and rising mortgagedefaults and foreclosures continued to weigh on the U.S. economy, and forecasts of
prospective credit losses at financial institutions both here and abroad continued to
increase. Indeed, one of the nation's largest thrift institutions, IndyMac, had recently
collapsed under the weight of distressed mortgages, and investors