To the Chairman, government intervention is less about the fat cats on Wall Street and more about avoiding, as he described in 2004, “images of men in hats and long coats standing in bread lines.”
But the takeaway lesson from the crisis, he said, was that “In the end, Fed officials decided not to intervene in the banking crisis.”
“The experience of the Depression helped forge a consensus that the government bears the important responsibility of trying to stabilize the economy and the financial system, as well as of assisting people affected by economic downturns,” he said.