Do you blame the market’s downturn today on Ben Bernanke’s comments? Does he really control the market in the short term or are his comments inconsequential? S&P 500 at 1,546.17, Dow at 13,918.22, Nasdaq at 2,699.49. [Yahoo Finance]
Updated May 10, 2011 and originally published July 18, 2007. If you enjoyed this article, subscribe to the RSS feed or receive daily emails. Follow @flexo on Twitter and visit our Facebook page for more updates.
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Luke Landes founded Consumerism Commentary in 2003 and has been building online communities since 1990. Luke, also known as Flexo, has contributed to PC World Magazine, US News, Forbes, and other publications. 
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I don’t believe the wider financial world listens to Bernanke yet. He’s still under the enormous shadow of Greenspan, and nothing he says will have anything close to the impact of his predecessor.
Sure: I will often blame daily market movements on myriad events such as words from the Fed Chief. HOWEVER, daily market movements are just noise in the system, so they don’t interest me in the least except for the evidence of herd behavior they reveal on Wall Street.
I’d like to think that he doesn’t have that kind of power, but it seemed like the markets were moving with what he had to say. It was really interesting to watch as he answered quite a bit of questions relating to Americans’ personal finances – things like how people have too credit card debt, no savings, etc.