Bernanke, Ben

So there are a number of reasons why asset purchases, while effective, while I think they have been important, are less -- less attractive tools than traditional interest rate policy. And that's the reason why we've relied primarily on interest rates, but used asset purchases as a supplement when we've needed it to keep forward progress. I think that, you know, obviously, there are some financial stability issues involved there. We look at the possibility that asset purchases have led to bubbly pricing in certain markets or in excessive leverage or excessive risk-taking. We don't think that that's happened to an extent, which is a danger to the system, except other than that, when those positions unwind, like we saw over the summer, they can create some bumpiness in -- in interest rate markets, in particular. Our general philosophy on financial stability issues is, where we can, that we try to address it first and foremost by making sure that the banking system and the financial system are as strong as possible -- if banks have a lot of capital, they can withstand losses, for example -- and by using whatever other tools we have to try to avoid bubbles or other kinds of financial risks. That being said, I don't think that you can completely ignore financial stability concerns in monetary policy, because we can't control them perfectly and there may be situations when financial instability has implications for our mandate, which is jobs and inflation, which we saw, of course, in the Great Recession. So it's a very complex issue. I think it will be many years before central banks have completely worked out exactly how best to deal with financial instability questions. Certainly, the first line of defense for us is regulatory and other types of measures, but we do have to pay some attention to that.