The End in Sight?

Ready the champagne: Federal Reserve Chairman Ben Bernanke said today that the recession should end this year and recovery will begin in 2010 if the government’s actions stabilize financial markets. "If actions taken by the administration, the Congress and the Federal Reserve are successful in restoring some measure of financial stability—and only if that is the case, in my view—there is a reasonable prospect that the current recession will end in 2009 and that 2010 will be a year of recovery," Mr. Bernanke said in prepared remarks to the Senate Banking Committee. That is, however, a big “if.” The Wall Street Journal notes that “Mr. Bernanke’s hopeful forecast contained caveats, the main one being that officials must successfully break what he called an ‘adverse feedback loop’ in which economic and financial strains become self-reinforcing.”