WASHINGTON, Jan. 31 (UPI) -- The U.S. Senate Tuesday confirmed Ben Bernanke as the chairman of the Federal Reserve.
Bernanke, a 52-year-old former Princeton University economist and head of the White House Council of Economic Advisors, succeeds Alan Greenspan, who concluded 18 years at the central bank's helm Tuesday by raising a key interest rate, the New York Times said.
"Monetary policy has become much less political than it used to be years back and centuries back," said Alan S. Blinder, a former Fed vice chairman who is a professor of economics at Princeton, where he was a colleague of Mr. Bernanke's.
"There's a consensus on what monetary policy should be doing, which is to say keeping inflation low and, subject to that constraint, keeping employment high. So politicians take this attitude that it's for technocrats, and it doesn't matter too much whether the guy is a Republican or a Democrat."
