Central banking is not rocket science, but neither is it a trivial pursuit. Excellent books have continued to be written about the art and craft of central banking, from Walter Bagehot's Lombard Street in 1873 to Alan Blinder's Central Banking in Theory and Practice in 1998. Running a central bank is in one way a little bit like flying a plane or sailing a boat: much of the time standard responses and small adjustments will do just fine, but every so often a situation arises in which fundamental understanding, knowledge of history, and good judgment can make the difference between riding out the storm and crashing. There was no such person in charge in 1929, and the result was disaster. There was one in 2008.

In his earlier scholarly life, Ben Bernanke, the chairman of the Federal Reserve Board, had been a careful student of the general interaction between the financial system and the real economy and especially of its working out in the Great Depression of the 1930s. So he had done his homework. His decisive and innovative actions at the Fed saved our economy from free fall with a possibly catastrophic end. I once non-joked that Bernanke was the Captain Kirk of central banking: he had loaned where no man had loaned before. In a life before turning to government service, first as a member of the Federal Reserve Board, then briefly as chairman of the Council of Economic Advisers, and then returning to the Fed as chairman in 2006, Bernanke was a well-known and highly respected academic economist. (The reader should know that I was one of his teachers in graduate school at MIT, and have remained a friend.) My opinion is that, after a briefly hesitant start as Fed chairman, probably still under the considerable aura of Alan Greenspan, Bernanke rose admirably to a difficult occasion and has been generally right in his judgments and his decisions, and in his willingness and his ability to explain both.

David Fuller's view I think this is a good article, well worth reading, particularly by Mr Bernanke's critics. However, Professor Solow does not comment on how and when his protégé, or his followers, should end quantitative easing (QE) and what the eventual consequences of this monetary experiment might be?

Opinion is widely divided as to what happens after QE, although Mr Bernanke appears reassuringly calm on the subject, without providing much in the way of details that I have seen.

I hope he is right but this will be a "known unknown", to quote Donald Rumsfeld in another context. However, I suspect the pending removal of QE will at least create some uncertainty, leading to a degree of market turbulence.

If that is all we have to worry about, history will be kind to Mr Bernanke. Meanwhile, people will continue to debate the potential inflationary and / or deflationary consequences following QE.