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James

Time magazine blew it.

Last week, it named Federal Reserve Chairman Ben Bernanke as its Person of the Year. The newsmagazine said it picked the Money Dome because he took bold action to forestall a depression.

“In terms of influence and how the economy went this year, Bernanke was the guy,” Time Managing Editor Richard Stengel told Bloomberg News.

Now, I’ll agree that the Fed’s actions did, indeed, keep us all out of the bread line, but it took many of those steps last year. This year, Bernanke has been the guy who turned the Fed into a political football, who’s taken it to the brink of congressional oversight and who’s fought to maintain its turf as a banking regulator even as he backed policies to support the too-big-to-fail syndrome that helped get us into this mess.

So, I’ve decided to name my own Person of the Year: Elizabeth Warren.

Warren is a voice of reason, rising over the din of politics.

A common-sense watchdog, she is the closest thing that most of us have to a true representative in this bailout process, which may be why so few in Washington seem to pay attention to her.

This year, Warren has led the Congressional Oversight Panel charged with monitoring the Troubled Asset Relief Program. It was her panel that issued the critical report I mentioned in my column last week that found while TARP may have helped avert a depression, it’s also turned the entire financial industry into a permanent ward of the government.

Warren has consistently railed against the unwillingness of federal regulators — including Bernanke’s Fed — to address too-big-to-fail.

A Harvard law professor, she has spent years writing and researching credit problems and economic stress. She is perhaps best known for co-authoring, with her daughter, The Two-Income Trap in 2003 , which analyzed household spending patterns and found that modern families were worse off than those a generation ago, even though more now have two breadwinners.

When Alan Greenspan ran the Fed, Warren wrote him letters asking how he planned to address the huge debt that Americans were piling up. She asked members of Congress the same thing. She never got any answers.

A Republican who grew up on a farm in Oklahoma, Warren also fought against adoption of the 2005 bankruptcy reform bill, which I dubbed the No Lender Left Behind Act because it essentially absolved credit card companies of responsibility for predatory practices.

In an essay she co-authored for the Stanford Law Review in 2006, Warren warned that banks’ attitudes had changed so dramatically since the Great Depression that we no longer had to worry about customers making a run on the banks, but rather banks making a “run on the customers.”

They were using so many fees and gimmicks to exploit the most vulnerable consumers that it was driving many into foreclosure, default and bankruptcy. Ruining customers would result in the collapse of the banking system as surely as ruining the banks, she warned.

That was three years and more than 100 bank failures ago.

Since being tapped by Congress to keep an eye on the TARP this year, Warren has warned that banks aren’t as healthy as they’re saying they are, and she’s voiced concerns that the worst of the problems with smaller banks may not be over.

Once again, Washington is telling her to talk to the hand.

For most of this decade, Warren has been right, she has sounded the alarm early and often, and she’s been ignored.

She herself noted in testimony earlier this year that the Treasury Department was brushing off her latest concerns about the banking industry. We ignore her at our own peril.

The Money Dome may be the guy with influence, but time will show that, once again, this year Warren was the person with insight.



Ben Bernanke as Time's Person of the Year?Really? - The Latest from MarketSpace - MarketSpace - Learn, Trade, Profit.

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"Every morning I get up and look through the Forbes list of the richest people in America. If I'm not there, I go to work." - Stocks on Wall Street