All hail Ben Bernanke

Here’s John Hilsenrath, the reporter with the best Fed sources:

Drawing broad support for the plan was important to Mr. Bernanke in part because the policies he was formulating could outlast him. His term as Fed chairman ends in January 2014. Seeing a return to U.S. full employment as a distant goal, Mr. Bernanke needed the support of officials who might remain at the Fed after he left.

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To move forward, Mr. Bernanke needed to corral several colleagues, including regional Fed bank president Dennis Lockhart from Atlanta, who had a vote on the Federal Open Market Committee, the Fed’s decision making body. Under Fed rules, four of the 12 regional Fed banks vote on the committee on a rotating basis; a fifth, the New York Fed, always votes.

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Like others, Mr. Lockhart had reservations about the effectiveness of Fed policies. Earlier bond buying hadn’t yet produced strong growth. The banking system, still damaged by the financial crisis, wasn’t delivering credit the way economists expected, given historically low interest rates. Still, Mr. Lockhart thought a program targeting the U.S. housing market might help.

Mr. Bernanke also worked on nonvoters, including Narayana Kocherlakota, who was going through his own transformation.

Several months after becoming president of the Minneapolis Fed in 2009, Mr. Kocherlakota believed the job market had structural problems beyond the reach of monetary policy””for example, too many construction workers who couldn’t easily be trained for other jobs.

Mr. Kocherlakota joined Fed skeptics, so-called hawks, who doubted the effectiveness of central bank activism. During his turn as a Fed voter last year, he voted twice against loosening credit, moves championed by Mr. Bernanke.

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Mr. Kocherlakota and Mr. Bernanke exchanged emails over months, debating structural unemployment””the idea that unemployment was caused by mismatches between employer needs and the skills and location of workers. In Mr. Bernanke’s view, employers weren’t hiring because of weak demand for their goods and services, which Fed policies might help remedy.

“I’ve learned a lot by talking to him,” Mr. Kocherlakota said in an interview after the September meeting. Mr. Bernanke’s “thinking is framed by data and models,” he said. “It beats coming in there with just your gut.”

By summer, Mr. Kocherlakota said, his views about structural unemployment were shifting as he found the evidence less than persuasive. This left an opening for Mr. Bernanke.

As the Fed’s August meeting approached, Mr. Bernanke and his inner circle, which included Fed Vice Chairwoman Janet Yellen and New York Fed President William Dudley, were thinking that any Fed action should be a comprehensive and novel package, rather than an incremental step, according to people familiar with their views. They agreed to take time to confirm their views of the U.S. economy and develop consensus for a plan.

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The Fed’s policy committee emerged from the August meeting with familiar fissures. Opponents of the Fed’s easy-money policies said the measures weren’t giving the economy much of a lift, while risking future inflation.

Dallas Fed president Richard Fisher said the Fed was like a doctor over-prescribing Ritalin to attention-deficient Wall Street traders. Richmond Fed president Jeffrey Lacker dissented in August for the fifth straight meeting, taking issue with a policy already in place: An assurance the Fed had given that short-term interest rates would remain near zero through late 2014. Philadelphia Fed President Charles Plosser said in an interview that he urged Mr. Bernanke to wait until year-end before deciding on any new programs.

Despite their public disagreements, Fed officials were friendly behind the scenes. Mr. Plosser, who favors tighter credit policies, and the Chicago Fed’s Charles Evans, who wants easier credit, play golf together. They joined Mr. Fisher and Mr. Lockhart for a round at the Chevy Chase Country Club after the August meeting.

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Many Fed activists wanted a open-ended program of bond purchases that would continue until the economy improved. Among them, some wanted to go big””at least a few hundred billion dollars worth over several months””with a promise to keep buying as needed. Moreover, some wanted to replace Operation Twist with bigger purchases of mortgage-backed securities and Treasurys.

As the September meeting neared, Mr. Bernanke needed to assure colleagues who still had reservations about moving too aggressively. In addition to Mr. Lockhart, Cleveland Fed president Sandra Pianalto had been wavering. She was among those who worried more Fed bond buying could disrupt markets.

Another fence-sitter was Washington-based Fed Governor Elizabeth Duke, a plain-spoken Virginia banker nominated to the Fed board by President George W. Bush in 2007.

Fed officials described the Fed chairman’s phone calls as low-pressure conversations. Mr. Bernanke sometimes dialed up colleagues while in his office on weekends, catching them off guard when their phones identified his private number as unknown. He gave updates on the latest staff forecasts, colleagues said. He asked their thoughts and what they could comfortably support, they said.

The calls helped Mr. Bernanke gauge how far he could push his committee. It also won him trust among some of his fiercest opponents, officials said. Nearly all of Mr. Bernanke’s colleagues described him as a good listener.

“Even if you disagree with him on the programs, you know your voice has been heard,” said Mr. Fisher, one of his opponents. “There is no effort to bully.”

Negotiations stepped up in the week before the meeting. Fed staff circulated language for policy options. Officials debated how different approaches would be described in the policy statement, which would be released after the meeting.

Officials at Fed policy meetings typically consider three options: one representing activists who want to use monetary policy aggressively; another supporting officials seeking conservative use; and a middle-ground option that typically prevails.

The premeeting documents this time listed four options, including an aggressive approach favored by activists, and no bond buying, favored by hawks. Among two middle-ground proposals was a compromise that Ms. Duke originated.

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At the meeting the following week, the Fed adopted the compromise that Ms. Duke helped spur. The Fed would continue Operation Twist through December but add an open-ended mortgage-bond buying program.

Activists got what they most wanted: An open-ended commitment to buy mortgage bonds until the job market improved, with the strong possibility of additional Treasury purchases later. Fence-sitters got a promise to review the plan before deciding to proceed with a bigger program in 2013. Mr. Lockhart said the chance to reassess the program based on inflation and the performance of the job market helped win him over.

With an agreement on bond buying largely in place, Fed officials at the September meeting left unanswered this question: When could they leave growth of the U.S. economy on its own? Mr. Kocherlakota and Mr. Evans failed to get agreement for inflation and unemployment thresholds to determine when to raise short-term rates, according to people familiar with the talks.

That’s exactly how a leader should manage a committee.

No one can say Bernanke is not well-intentioned, even if they wish he’d moved a bit faster.  Does anyone know how the timing of bringing in the management consultant (Robinson) compares to Larry Ball’s paper on Bernanke’s quiet personality?

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