Is Bernanke an interventionist

I'd be interested to hear from people who support non-intervention even when the entire economy may enter recession/depression. Greenspan's philosophy was intervention, Bernanke's wasn't, except he's now intervened 6 times in 2 weeks, heh.

http://www.moneyweb.co.za/mw/view/mw/en/page95?oid=154890&sn=Detail

Greenspan asserted that central bankers need not be concerned if a collapsing financial asset bubble does not threaten to impair the real economy, its production, jobs, and price stability. Indeed, he noted, the sharp stock market break of 1987 had few negative consequences for the economy. “But we should not”, Greenspan continued, “underestimate or become complacent about the complexity of the interactions of asset markets and the economy.

“Thus, evaluating shifts in balance sheets generally, and in asset prices particularly, must be an integral part of the development of monetary policy”. In the current instance the Federal Reserve has intervened not because asset prices were too high, but because uncertainties in increasingly opaque credit markets pushed investor uncertainty over the edge.

So, it turns out that not just people are over leveraged, I found out that hedge funds, who now own more assets than investment banks, can typically be 20x leveraged. In other words, for the billion they own, they borrow 19 billion.



So I gather that's where a lot of the aggregate margin debt is coming from, not just individual investors.