Ben Bernanke Quotes
It’s much better than shutting down trade to help people adjust to the effects of trade.
Ben Bernanke, Chairman, Federal Reserve Board, Comment on a proposal to change the accounting regulatory rules in the midst of the sub prime mortgage induced economic crisis, Testimony, Senate Banking Committee, February 28, 2008
Sourced by: Eigen's Political and Historical Quotations
Although aggregate employment has remained relatively stable as global free trade has become the U. S. policy, there has been major employment disruption with some types of people benefiting and others like blue collar manufacturing workers having their entire careers wiped out. Port cities like Seattle, Baltimore have boomed while Midwestern manufacturing cities have deteriorated greatly.
It is interesting that the first national women’s political party was a strong advocate of protectionism and saw free trade as an unfair hurdle for mostly male workers. At the time, the Republicans were staunch protectionists, and the Democrats, the free traders thus illustrating that the major parties continuously flip-flop on major issues.
A self-contained market would be one in which a country only makes products that it sells within its borders, and only sells products that in makes in the country. Very primitive cultures were self-contained markets, but trading generally takes place whenever two cultures interact unless politicians artificially prevent it.
The nation, under the pressure of a depression, had adopted a free trade philosophy. We would go back to protectionism in the 1930s and back to free trade in the 1960s. Ironically, it was generally the Republican party that has driven these shifts. There has always been a free trade wing of the party and an isolationist wing.
Democratic politicians of that era mostly opposed free trade because the experience ever since NAFTA showed that many manufacturing jobs were lost in the United States although many new jobs were created but few of these were good paying jobs that Americans with limited educations could perform as they were able to with manufacturing jobs. And during that period, the requirements for fair trade and foreign workers rights have been very poorly enforced. The Democrats split between those who thought that new trade treaties could be negotiated and enforced, correcting the problems of the past, and those who did not believe that such proper free trade was very likely.
Referring to NAFTA, CAFTA and other international trade agreements
The U. S. was very protectionist in its early history. Grant overestimated the time that it would take for us to change by about 100 years.
Ben Shalom Bernanke is an American economist at the Brookings Institution who served two terms as the 14th Chair of the Federal Reserve, from 2006 to 2014. During his tenure as chair, Bernanke oversaw the Federal Reserve's response to the late-2000s financial crisis, for which he was named the 2009 Time Person of the Year. Before becoming Federal Reserve chair, Bernanke was a tenured professor at Princeton University and chaired the department of economics there from 1996 to September 2002, when he went on public service leave.
