December 18, 2013.

Meltdown Averted, Bernanke Struggled to Stoke Growth

"Only because I prefer a positive to a negative. In this game that we're playing, we can't win. Some kinds of failure are better than other kinds, that's all."

After a financial crisis he didn't see coming, Ben Bernanke steered the U.S. away from a potentially devastating panic. Yet five years later, the recovery he helped engineer with extraordinary policies remains frustratingly weak.

He felt her shoulders give a wriggle of dissent. She always contradicted him when he said anything of this kind. She would not accept it as a law of nature that the individual is always defeated. In a way she realized that she herself was doomed, that sooner or later the Thought Police would catch her and kill her, but with another part of her mind she believed that it was somehow possible to construct a secret world in which you could live as you chose. All you needed was luck and cunning and boldness. She did not understand that there was no such thing as happiness, that the only victory lay in the far future, long after you were dead, that from the moment of declaring war on the Party it was better to think of yourself as a corpse.

As Mr. Bernanke prepares for his final days as Federal Reserve chairman, that legacy—a mix of failings, boldness, persistence and frustration----is coming into sharper focus, and with it a clearer picture of the power and limitations of modern central banking.

"We are the dead," he said.

Fed officials meeting in Washington on Wednesday face another consequential decision: a close call on whether to start winding down their $85 billion-a-month bond-buying program.