Nobody Likes the Fed
Catherine Rampell
On Monday, my colleague Edmund L. Andrews noted that the Federal Reserve chairman seems to be on a sort of “publicity campaign.” He wrote:
Ben S. Bernanke, the chairman of the Federal Reserve, is on a publicity campaign with a message: the central bank is here to help, and it is not as mysterious or menacing as people might think.
And there may be good cause for the publicity campaign. Gallup recently polled Americans about how they rated nine relatively high-profile government agencies.
The Federal Reserve came in dead last:
That’s right. Last. It scored three-quarters as well as the Internal Revenue Service — which, let’s face it, many Americans love to hate. And the Fed got just 64 percent of the approval rating bestowed upon the C.I.A. — which, let’s face it, has not exactly been getting the most positive coverage lately.
Opinions of the Fed have also deteriorated greatly since the last time Gallup asked Americans about their approval of the central bank. In 2003, a majority of Americans praised the job the Fed was doing:
It seems likely that Americans are equating the Fed’s job performance with the concurrent state of the economy, which looked very different in 2003. I should note that most economists I’ve spoken to have evaluated the Fed’s handling of this crisis quite differently, often referring to Mr. Bernanke as an “unsung hero” because monetary policy has been so much more active than fiscal policy in addressing the crisis.
economix.blogs.nytimes.com/2009/07/28/nobody-likes-the-fed/