Ben Bernanke spoke this morning about the importance of Fed power, and what a darn shame it is that the US Fed usually has to rely on “moral suasion” while other Feds have more explicit regulatory power over financial firms, and wouldn’t it be nice if he had that kind of authority too. I think it would be quite nice if we gave him a magic wand:

Full text of Bernanke speech here. Futures are still down, but they seemed to like this speech okay. Bernanke reiterated the importance of rescuing Bear Stearns a few times, and talked about how he’d like to reduce the number of times intervention is necessitated, but that, of course, means he is still happy to intervene in future cases.