Washington: In the hours before and after US President Barack Obama renominated him as chairman of the US Federal Reserve, Ben Bernanke got two reminders of the thorny tasks that await him in his second term.
Late on Monday, a federal judge ruled the central bank must name firms that borrowed from the various emergency lending programs Bernanke crafted on the fly to avert a financial collapse, a decision certain to intensify debate over the Fed's transparency and independence.
Then, less than an hour after Bernanke shared a podium with Obama on Tuesday and pledged to restore a more stable economic and financial environment, two sets of budget forecasts underscored the policy dilemma he will soon face.
Bernanke must dismantle his trillion-dollar special lending program and normalize US interest rates without undermining the economic recovery. He must also soothe angry lawmakers without allowing politics to interfere with policy.
"The Fed's greatest challenge over the next few years is going to be having the courage to tighten policy significantly and possibly sharply in the face of massive political opposition," said Stephen Stanley, an economist at RBS in Greenwich, Connecticut.
That opposition is already on full display in Congress. Many lawmakers think the Fed overstepped its authority when it committed tens of billions of dollars to prevent the disorderly collapses of investment bank Bear Stearns and insurance company AIG, and want the central bank to fully disclose the terms and beneficiaries.
Now that a judge has ordered the Fed to release details about its special lending programs, Bernanke can expect even more heated questions over why he insists on secrecy.
The Fed is reviewing the judge's decision, but RBS's Stanley said if it ends up losing this battle, it could trigger "the mother of all runs to the door."
"No bank will want its name splashed on the front page of the newspaper, so everyone will be looking to scramble out of" the central bank's lending programs.
Bernanke, who has long been a proponent of increasing transparency at the historically secretive Fed and twice agreed to prime-time television events, may have to lift the veil a bit more to fend off more drastic encroachments.
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POLITICS ASIDE, MAYBE
While the congressional hearings are likely to be heated, Bernanke is widely expected to win Senate confirmation of his re-appointment. Indeed, in picking Bernanke, Obama may have defused some of the politics surrounding the Fed.
Michael Feroli, an economist with JPMorgan in New York, said having a Democratic president renominate a Republican Fed chairman "should be a positive for foreign investor confidence."
"It should ease some of the concerns that monetary policy has been politicized," he said.
While the central bank in theory is supposed to be free from political meddling, Bernanke is well aware that it isn't that simple in practice.
The budget numbers released on Tuesday served as a reminder that the United States is spending more than it collects in tax and other revenue, and the 76-million-strong Baby Boomer generation will soon start collecting costly Social Security and Medicare benefits, straining public finances even further.
A second Bernanke 2010-to-2014 term would coincide with some of the biggest waves of retiring Baby Boomers. The oldest members of that group reach age 65 in 2011.
Bernanke has already shown Congress that the Fed can quickly print money to stave off a crisis if necessary. That lesson will be fresh in lawmakers' minds as they grapple with unpopular decisions about how to cut spending.
If the Fed were to bow to political pressure to buy more Treasury debt to finance heavy government spending, that would set off alarms with foreign investors whose purchases of US bonds help keep borrowing costs low.
Those investors, particularly China and Japan, are already nervously watching to see how Bernanke will finesse the delicate task of unwinding lending programs and raising interest rates when the time comes.
Judging from the favorable reactions from his counterparts overseas on Tuesday, Bernanke has the confidence of world central bankers. European Central Bank President Jean-Claude Trichet said he and Bernanke "have had an excellent and very close working relationship."
That will come in handy as countries plan how to exit their policies of extraordinary economic support, something that is likely to be the hot topic when Group of 20 finance leaders gather in London next week to prepare for a G20 summit in Pittsburgh later in September.
Bernanke, a scholar of the Great Depression, is determined not to repeat the mistakes of the 1930s when the government and central bank clamped down on economic stimulus at the first sign of recovery.
"If he can pull off this recovery that still needs nurturing, he could well go down as one of the greatest Fed chairmen in history," said Chris Rupkey, an economist at Bank of Tokyo-Mitsubishi in New York.
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