Ben Bernanke was confirmed by the Senate Banking Committee in a 16-7 vote where neither party voted in unison.  The vote did not come as a surprise as he is still considered a relatively popular Fed Chairman.  We have found problems with many of his policies, particularly involving lowering interest rates to a degree that inflation is likely to increase drastically soon.  Specifically, we have found that the interest rate declines did not provide the short term boosts they were supposed to while maintaining the long term drawbacks.  Ultimately, he will likely be reconfirmed for a 4 year term by the United States Senate in a bipartisan vote sometime in the next month.  But the fact that so many people on both sides of the isle are opposing his reconfirmation is truly telling.  The Fed’s role should be to maintain economic stability in hard times.  Ben Bernanke has unfortunately used to position to keep inflation, borrowing, and spending in sinusoidal fluctuations that hurt the stability of the economy.  His reaction to the melt-down involved very drastic interest rate cuts that were not necessary and only served to weaken the dollar.  Before that, his drastic increase in interest rates led to the melt-down in the economy since people were less willing to borrow and spend.  So while he will be confirmed again, it will be much closer than it was 4 years ago.  Let this be a lesson that you cannot just toy with interest rates so much that it leads to a cyclical increase in inflation and subsequent decrease in consumer spending.  That is a damaging policy to our economy and is detrimental to the stability of the financial markets: a stability necessary in order to prevent any future melt-downs.