LOOKING GOOD

Were Bernanke and Geithner Right?

Upbeat economic news has even Roubini issuing praise.

After months of constant criticism from left and right alike, Treasury Secretary Tim Geithner and Fed Chairman Ben Bernanke might finally be winning over some critics. "What if in the end they got it right?" David Leonhardt asks in The New York Times on Saturday, pointing to better-than-expected unemployment numbers, a surging stock market, and improving credit markets as evidence of a possible policy success. While much could still go wrong, the officials who have confronted the crisis recently scored some praise for their efforts from top economists, including Nouriel Roubini, the famously pessimistic economist who predicted the crisis. “Bernanke, Obama, Geithner, and Summers were intelligent enough to know that the right-wing crowd was crazy to say, ‘Let the banks go bankrupt,’ and confident enough to ignore the left-wing ‘Nationalize the banks’ crowd,” economist Robert Barbera, who has criticized the Fed for not seeing the crisis coming, told the Times. “I give them very high marks.”