This is the Cato Daily Podcast for Wednesday, January 13, 2010.

I'm Caleb Brown.

Ben Bernanke's recent defense of the Federal Reserve should make even fed defenders nervous, says the Central Bank's performance

leading up to and in response to the financial crisis were entirely appropriate.

Mark Calabria, Director of Financial Regulation Studies at the Cato Institute offers his thoughts.

It's not necessarily an honor to be named Man of the Year.

And the honor comes back sometimes to haunt you.

We all remember when Greenspan Rubin and Summers were the cover of Time team to say, you know,

the committee to save the world.

That really looks great in retrospect.

You say that there are some distinct camps of people

evaluating his performance thus far,

especially in light of the financial crisis.

How does Bernanke evaluate his own performance?

And then what are those camps of evaluating Bernanke?

Well, one is to keep in mind, I look at it

as there are two periods of his performance and part of this covers not simply his time as chairman but his time as a Fed governor.

Leading up to the housing bubble if you look at the years from 2002 to the bubble finally burst in 2006.

He was a governor most of this time.

There were a couple years at the end where he was at the White House.

But when he was governor, he was the loudest voice for keeping rates very low during those

green span years.

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