If you’re dying to stand in Ben Bernanke’s shoes for a moment, the Federal Reserve has just the ticket.
It’s called The Fed Experience and it’s opening tomorrow at the Richmond Fed in Virginia.
The “interactive, multimedia exhibit” aims to show viewers how the Fed improves living standards by keeping prices stable.
Visitors will have a chance to “grab a few of your friends and play the price stability challenge,” for instance, which shows how inflation affects economic decision-making. The show promises to “bring the economy to life.”
If only. The opening comes at a time when the Fed faces frustration over the high level of unemployment, and worries that a massive debt burden will send the nation staggering into another recession. Nearly two years after policymakers rescued the financial system, observers are growing frustrated at the limits of the Fed’s powers to heal the economy.
Indeed, Bernanke spoke Monday in Washington of the Fed’s own exasperation on the subject of small business lending. Borrowers indicate credit remains tight for small borrowers even as the Fed makes funds nearly free for the biggest lenders.
That means a leading source of job creation, small business hiring, is still bottled up even as the economy grows.
“The formation and growth of small businesses depends critically on access to credit,” Bernanke said. “Unfortunately, those businesses report that credit conditions remain very difficult.”
Bernanke, as he has repeatedly said over the past year, promised to find ways to help small businesses get funds to expand.
“Making credit accessible to sound small businesses is crucial to our economic recovery and so should be front and center among our current policy challenges,” he said.
But he acknowledged that depressed economic conditions mean less demand for loans, and made no promises about policies that might boost lending. Actually bringing the economy back to life, it turns out, is no simple thing.