Federal Reserve Chairman Ben S. Bernanke said the central bank will “forcefully” use every resource to restore financial-market stability and revive U.S. economic growth.
“We will continue to forcefully deploy all the tools at our disposal as long as necessary to support the restoration of financial stability and the resumption of healthy economic growth,” Bernanke said in prepared remarks for an event today in Dillon, South Carolina. The Fed chief returned to his hometown to attend a ceremony naming a highway interchange after him.
Bernanke didn’t comment on specific Fed policies in his remarks. He said he was aware Dillon now “faces challenges” with the economy in a recession.
“I learned how very hard people in small towns like Dillon, and in communities large and small all across the United States, have to work to support themselves and their families and to offer opportunities to their children,” the Fed chairman said.
Bernanke, 55, was born in Augusta, Georgia, in December 1953 and grew up in Dillon, a textile-and-farm town in a poor part of one of the nation’s poorest states. His father, Philip, owned a drugstore, Jay Bee Drugs, with his uncle. His mother, Edna, was a schoolteacher.
He recalled in his speech how worked at the family’s pharmacy, spent a summer as a construction worker building the Saint Eugene Hospital and waited on tables at South of the Border, a restaurant and amusement park off Interstate 95.
The unemployment rate in Dillon County in December was 14.2 percent, compared with 9.5 percent for South Carolina, according to the state’s Employment Security Commission. The U.S. unemployment rate jumped in February to 8.1 percent, the highest level in more than a quarter century, the government reported yesterday.