Life at Zero Percent

If the U.S. economy were a disabled cruise ship, Barack Obama and Mitt Romney would be on the bridge arguing over who should take the wheel. Meanwhile, Chief Engineer Ben Bernanke, caked with soot, would be down in the engine room trying everything he could think of to get the ship restarted.

Under Bernanke’s chairmanship, the Federal Reserve has resorted to measures that are unprecedented in the bank’s 99-year history. It lowered its target interest rate as much as it could, from more than 5 percent in 2007 to between zero and 0.25 percent since 2008. It bought almost $2 trillion in long-term bonds. And it kept stretching out how long it intended to keep rates superlow. The latest target date, announced on Sept. 13, is at least through mid-2015, nearly eight years after the economy first tipped into recession. In a speech in Jackson Hole, Wyo., on Aug. 31, Bernanke conceded that the Fed is making it up as it goes along. He called this “the process of learning by doing.”