Time misses the boat on the Person of the Year
By LOREN STEFFY

Time magazine blew it.

Last week, it named Federal Reserve Chairman Ben Bernanke as its Person of the Year. The newsmagazine said it picked the Money Dome because he took bold action to forestall a depression.

“In terms of influence and how the economy went this year, Bernanke was the guy,” Time Managing Editor Richard Stengel told Bloomberg News.

Now, I'll agree that the Fed's actions did, indeed, keep us all out of the bread line, but it took many of those steps last year. This year, Bernanke has been the guy who turned the Fed into a political football, who's taken it to the brink of congressional oversight and who's fought to maintain its turf as a banking regulator even as he backed policies to support the too-big-to-fail syndrome that helped get us into this mess.

So, I've decided to name my own Person of the Year: Elizabeth Warren.

Warren is a voice of reason, rising over the din of politics.

A common-sense watchdog, she is the closest thing that most of us have to a true representative in this bailout process, which may be why so few in Washington seem to pay attention to her.

This year, Warren has led the Congressional Oversight Panel charged with monitoring the Troubled Asset Relief Program. It was her panel that issued the critical report I mentioned in my column last week that found while TARP may have helped avert a depression, it's also turned the entire financial industry into a permanent ward of the government.

Warren has consistently railed against the unwillingness of federal regulators — including Bernanke's Fed — to address too-big-to-fail.

A Harvard law professor, she has spent years writing and researching credit problems and economic stress. She is perhaps best known for co-authoring, with her daughter, The Two-Income Trap in 2003 , which analyzed household spending patterns and found that modern families were worse off than those a generation ago, even though more now have two breadwinners.

When Alan Greenspan ran the Fed, Warren wrote him letters asking how he planned to address the huge debt that Americans were piling up. She asked members of Congress the same thing. She never got any answers.

A Republican who grew up on a farm in Oklahoma, Warren also fought against adoption of the 2005 bankruptcy reform bill, which I dubbed the No Lender Left Behind Act because it essentially absolved credit card companies of responsibility for predatory practices.

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