Ben Shalom Bernanke – Jewlicious?

So Alan Greenspan is leaving the Fed after many years of service. Bush’s nominee to replace Greenspan as the outgoing Chairman of the Federal Reserve Board is Ben S. Bernanke. The S. stands for Shalom. My meager Googling skills did not turn up any information relating to Mr. Bernanke’s religion, but I figure with a middle name like Shalom, he’s either Jewlicious or gets an honorary Jewlicious title.

Ben Shalom Bernanke, the son of a pharmacist in Dillon, S.C., displayed his significant intellectual capacity early in life. He won the state spelling bee in the sixth grade, taught himself calculus in high school, and earned the highest college admission test scores in South Carolina in the year that he applied to college.

He also graduated summa cum laude from Harvard University in 1975 and earned his Ph.D. from M.I.T.

You can read more about the appointment and its apparently positive reception in the marketplace at the NY Times. He is a former Princeton professor and Fed Board member.

Mr. Bernanke responded to those concerns in a speech in October 2003, when he said any inflation target be considered a long-term goal and that the Fed would not set a “fixed time frame for reaching it.” He also acknowledged the political concerns an official inflation target would raise and said they could be allayed with deftly worded provisions that preserved the Fed’s flexibility.

“We would have the explicit proviso that important short-run economic and financial goals will not be sacrificed in order to reach the long-term inflation objective more quickly,” he said in that speech at the Federal Reserve Bank of St. Louis. “Although it would be important to vet these ideas thoroughly with the relevant Congressional committees before proceeding, I am hopeful that a change of the type I am proposing would be acceptable to Congress as being within the spirit of existing legislation.”

His remarks were delivered at a time when the Fed and economists were increasingly concerned about the prospects of deflation, a rare falling of prices. Mr. Bernanke’s early academic work focused on the causes of the Great Depression, one of the starkest examples of deflation in economic history.

I also wouldn’t be too surprised if the white supremacist twin girls (Prussian Blue) will shortly add a song about Jewish bankers to their repertoire.