Henri de Saint-Simon (1760-1825), a French intellectual, was one of the founding fathers of socialism. Saint-Simon wanted to forge a “scientific understanding of society” which he would use to eliminate poverty and inequality by centrally planning the economy through the Parisian Banking Houses.In this article, I argue that Ben Bernanke—along with his other two musketeers, Hank Paulson and Timothy Geithner—are Saint-Simonians par excellence, expressed particularly fervently in their views towards the financial system during and after the Great Financial Crisis. In the following article, we shall look at Bernanke’s The Courage to Act and Bernanke, Paulson, and Geithner’s Firefighting. If the conventional prescription to the Great Financial Crisis could be boiled down to a single word, it
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