






Ben Bernanke Associated Press



Yes, much of Wall Street wants to see Mr. Bernanke confirmed. The Street is currently making a bundle off Fed policy, as it borrows at near-zero rates and lends long, and the banks don't want that to end. The banks also loved negative real interest rates in the middle of the last decade, and we know how that turned out. Wall Street always loves easy money—until inflation returns, or the bubbles pop.

Others argue that any alternative to Mr. Bernanke could be worse, and that is certainly a risk. Mr. Geithner and White House economic adviser Larry Summers couldn't be confirmed, even in a Democratic Senate. In the short term if Mr. Bernanke is defeated, Vice Chairman Donald Kohn might run the Open Market Committee, and he shares Mr. Bernanke's contempt for Fed critics. President Obama could also select San Francisco Fed President Janet Yellen, but she thinks the Fed should be even easier.

Still, we can think of current or former presidents of regional Fed banks who have hard money credentials. They would also not carry the baggage of whatever Harry Reid extracted as a price of confirmation.

We agree that the Fed needed to ease money precipitously when the financial markets suffered their heart attack in late 2008, and we praised Mr. Bernanke for that at the time and since. But the issue for the next four years is whether the Fed can extricate itself from its historic interventions before it creates a new round of boom and bust. We already see signs that it has waited too long to move.

The Fed as an institution is also under political attack in a way that it hasn't been since the early 1980s, and that was when Paul Volcker was being excoriated for being too tight. That criticism has rarely if ever been leveled at Mr. Bernanke. The next Fed chairman is going to need the market credibility, and the political support, to raise interest rates when much of Congress and Wall Street will be telling him to stay at zero. That is the real reason to oppose a second term for Chairman Bernanke.