Mr. Bernanke then did his best to be boring, sending the message to markets roiled by his comments last month that it was much ado about nothing.
American financial markets, roiled by the collapse of the subprime-mortgage market, have shown a "pronounced turnaround" since March, Alan Greenspan, former chairman of the Federal Reserve, said Friday.
His address, a video of which was made available on YouTube, was part of an effort to calm financial markets roiled by the failure of an outgoing president and a lame-duck Congress to come up with a plan to lift the economy and restore investor confidence.
To defend Morgan Stanley, it is fair to note that Facebook went public in the face of a market roiled by European worries.
The market-roiling force in question is the huge mortgage-backed securities market and the leveraged traders who call it home.
There have been many, many books on this general theme over the years, and Mr. Bach does not offer any market-roiling innovations.
And the study ended in 2006, well before problems in the subprime mortgage market roiled the stock market and swept away some of the fortunes and jobs of those reaping the benefits of a strong economy.
At first, as the market roiled, the government intervened, banning state-owned enterprises from selling off their shares, and buying up hundreds of billions of dollars worth of stocks in an effort to prop up the market.
UBS, Europe's largest bank by assets, agreed to pay Sumitomo 10 billion yen ($85 million) to settle litigation concerning market-roiling transactions a decade ago by a rogue trader known as "Mr. Copper".
