Ben S. Bernanke said the headwinds that have held back the U.S. economymay be abating, leaving the country poised for faster growth as his tenure as Federal Reserve chairman comes to an end.

“The combination of financial healing, greater balance in the housing market, less fiscal restraint, and, of course, continued monetary policy accommodation bodes well for U.S. economic growth in coming quarters,” Bernanke said today in a speech in Philadelphia. “Of course, if the experience of the past few years teaches us anything, it is that we should be cautious in our forecasts.”

Bernanke used his remarks to reflect on his eight years as leader of the U.S. central bank, steering the economy through the most severe economic and financial crisis since the 1930s. Policy makers last month trimmed the Fed’s monthly bond buying to $75 billion from $85 billion, taking a first step toward unwinding unprecedented stimulus engineered by Bernanke to put millions of unemployed Americans back to work.

Bernanke’s speech was followed by praise from Anil Kashyap, a professor at the University of Chicago’s Booth School of Business and Kenneth Rogoff ofHarvard University.

“My joke is that he did not want the first sentence of his Wikipedia page to be ‘Ben Bernanke, he studied the Great Depression and then caused the next one,’ and so he made sure that was not the case,” Kashyap said. He then shared with the audience a musical tribute to Bernanke, set to the tune of “Rudolph the Red-Nosed Reindeer.”

David Fuller's view

I have never seen Mr Bernanke looking more contented than in the photo which you can see by clicking on the article link above.  And we have certainly enjoyed the bull market to date.