Did Bush pressure Bernanke?
Take this for whatever it’s worth, from the insider-Washington website Swoop:
White House officials have told us that President Bush intervened forcibly to convince an initially reluctant Federal reserve to reduce interest rates. “There were some telephone calls from the White House to the Fed in which some very crude language was used.”
Did a guy known as “Helicopter Ben” really need to be strong-armed into lowering rates? Obviously I have no idea, but there’s precedent: Richard Nixon successfully bullied Arthur Burns
to loosen monetary policy going into the ’72 election.
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