Well hello. We missed it, but Ben Bernanke got all hot under the collar when talking about the rescue of AIG at today’s Senate Budget Committee hearing in Washington.
“If there is a single episode in this entire 18 months that has made me more angry, I can’t think of one other than AIG,” he said, adding that the company “made huge numbers of irresponsible bets, took huge losses, there was no regulatory oversight because there was a gap in the system.”
It may not sound like it, but this is some righteous indignation coming from the Federal Reserve chairman, who usually displays about as much emotion as the Ben Stein character in Ferris Bueller. And you can tell from the pictures that he has truly been affected by this, mood-wise. On the left he looks calm and placid. That was before the last AIG bailout. But see how on the right his mouth is just a little bit tenser? And his one eyelid is drooped ever so slightly, like it’s going to twitch manically, but then it doesn’t? Yeah. That’s the face Bernanke makes when he is pissed.
Bernanke Says Insurer AIG Operated Like a Hedge Fund [Bloomberg]
