The Federal Reserve’s slow response to the global inflation crisis “was a mistake,” said Former Federal Reserve Chairman Ben Bernanke during an appearance on CNBC that aired on May 16.
Bernanke said that the central bank’s slow response to inflation has allowed the crisis to escalate into one of the worst periods in financial history since the early 1980s.
The former Fed chair, who served from 2006 until 2014, led the central bank through the 2008 financial crisis and was in part responsible for initiating the revolutionary, expansive loose monetary policy strategy.
He told CNBC that the decision on when the bank should have acted to tame inflation was “complicated” and that the challenges specific to the arrival of the pandemic in 2020 had complicated the bank’s task.