Bernanke offers wisdom but no hint of Fed moves

Associated Press

WASHINGTON

Ben Bernanke gave the graduating class of Prince-ton University one of the more unusual speeches for a Federal Reserve chairman: He quoted everyone from Lily Tomlin to Forrest Gump and scarcely mentioned economics.

Bernanke’s words are normally scrutinized by global investors for hints about the Fed’s possible next move. But in his address Sunday on Princeton’s campus in New Jersey, he specifically cautioned that his comments “have nothing whatsoever to do with interest rates.” Instead, he took a poke at his profession.

“Economics,” Bernanke told the graduates, “is a highly sophisticated field of thought that is superb at explaining to policy-makers precisely why the choices they made in the past were wrong. About the future, not so much.”

Bernanke also offered nothing that could be taken as a signal of when the Fed might begin to taper its $85-billion-a-month in bond purchases. Those purchases have been intended to keep loan costs at record lows to encourage borrowing and spending.

Bernanke delivered the baccalaureate address to about 1,300 graduates in University Chapel. He was introduced by Princeton University President Shirley M. Tilghman, who said that Bernanke’s academic research into the Great Depression while he was teaching at Princeton had prepared him to guide the U.S. economy as Fed chairman during the 2007-2009 Great Recession.