Consider the source. They named Hitler Man of the Year back in the day.
They pick the most influential person of the year. His or her influence needn’t necessarily be a good one, just that said influence had, in their opinion, the greatest impact on people, and it’s hard to argue for someone who had more impact than the man who helped steer the US economy, and as a result, the rest of the world, into a gigantic recession.
From the article:
Professor Bernanke of Princeton was a leading scholar of the Great Depression. He knew how the passive Fed of the 1930s helped create the calamity — through its stubborn refusal to expand the money supply and its tragic lack of imagination and experimentation. Chairman Bernanke of Washington was determined not to be the Fed chairman who presided over Depression 2.0. So when turbulence in U.S. housing markets metastasized into the worst global financial crisis in more than 75 years, he conjured up trillions of new dollars and blasted them into the economy; engineered massive public rescues of failing private companies; ratcheted down interest rates to zero; lent to mutual funds, hedge funds, foreign banks, investment banks, manufacturers, insurers and other borrowers who had never dreamed of receiving Fed cash; jump-started stalled credit markets in everything from car loans to corporate paper; revolutionized housing finance with a breathtaking shopping spree for mortgage bonds; blew up the Fed’s balance sheet to three times its previous size; and generally transformed the staid arena of central banking into a stage for desperate improvisation. He didn’t just reshape U.S. monetary policy; he led an effort to save the world economy.
Works for me. Who you got?
Floater
December 18, 2009, 1:58pm
5
Mindfield:
They pick the most influential person of the year. His or her influence needn’t necessarily be a good one, just that said influence had, in their opinion, the greatest impact on people…
They have also picked Usama bin Laden and, as Mindfield implied, they don’t run a popularity contest.
