Who is bernankes boss

Politicians generally prefer holding interest rates low, as a means of stimulating the economy and boosting jobs. He made his comments in a speech at a conference in Tokyo on the future of central banking in a globalised economy. Bernanke, who has had to grapple with a financial crisis brought on in part by complex investment products, keeps his assets in plain vanilla vehicles such as retirement plans, mutual funds and savings accounts. The Fed chairman, a former economics professor at Princeton University, has most of his wealth in two annuities managed by TIAA-CREF, which provides retirement savings plans for academic institutions and other nonprofits.

Still, Bernanke did better than the stock market as a whole last year, which plummeted as the housing and credit crises sent the economy into a steep recession. The Fed has taken a leading role in combating the downturn, slashing the interest rate it controls to nearly zero and pumping trillions of dollars into the financial system.

And he hasn't. While Bernanke's Fed has resisted calls to step on the monetary brakes to avoid inflation, it has also resisted calls to apply more monetary gas to try to accelerate a tepid recovery. On Tuesday, the Fed finally acknowledged the recovery is losing steam, and approved a modest effort to buy Treasury bonds with the proceeds from maturing mortgage securities. But that's just a complex way to maintain the status quo; it will prevent a slight contraction of the money supply, but it won't expand the money supply.

Bernanke, after all, is one of the intellectual godfathers of the dovish notion that central banks can still step on the gas to promote growth even when interest rates hit zero.

As a Princeton scholar, he chastised Japan's central bank for passivity in similar circumstances; he also famously argued that passive, inflation-obsessed central bankers caused the Great Depression. That's why he was Person of the Year. The short answer seems to be that Bernanke fears the potential benefits of more monetary stimulus would be modest and uncertain, while the potential risks would be dramatic and real. In this way, Bernanke seems more a legislator, one who works with peers, than an executive, one who dictates.

Toward that end, here are some lessons you can follow to keep dialogue flowing. Open up. If you want to keep discussion going, you should keep talking. If the topic is critical to the future of the company, throw out your calendar. Mediators employ this technique to help resolve disputes between adversaries. Give a little up. The secret to good conversation is give and take.