How much money will Bernanke receive as advance for his book?

Let´s see. For his memoirs as Fed Chairman Greenspan pocketed 8 million from Penguin. Given PCE inflation Bernanke should get at least 9 million from the same editor. But Bernanke´s book is worth more. Greenspan presided over the Great Moderation. Great Moderations don´t give rise to dramas as does a Great Recession (Lesser Depression).

Then there are all the jostling’s over the rescue of financial institutions (that should be the boring part of the book) and how the Fed avoided a second Great Depression.

In the most important chapter of his book “The Age of Turbulence”, chapter 20 The “Conundrum”, Greenspan concludes thus:

Many economists in fact credit central bank monetary policy as the key factor in the last decade´s reduction in inflation worldwide. I would like to believe that…But I very much doubt that either policy actions or central bank anti-inflationary credibility played the leading role…That decline (and the conundrum) can be accounted for by forces other than monetary policy. In fact…I was struck by how relatively easy it was to bring inflation down…

I wonder if Bernanke will also conclude that “non-monetary” forces were responsible for the big fall in employment and depressed state of output that characterizes his tenure.

That wouldn´t surprise me. He has done it before regarding the Great Depression with his famous article “Non-Monetary Effects of the Financial Crisis in the Propagation of the Great Depression”.

He will certainly have to be paid more (maybe much more) than Greenspan because he will have to be a genius to convince people that he was not responsible for something very bad. Greenspan only “confessed” that he was not responsible for something good – a long stretch of low inflation, low unemployment and stable real growth!

“Full disclosure”. I have made little money from an e-book that explains why things went wrong and what could be done to make them right