Chairman Bernanke says failure of Bear Stearns would have severely shaken confidence

Chairman of the Federal Reserve System Board of Governors Ben Bernanke testified at the Joint Economic Committee Hearing on "The Economic Outlook," saying normally the market sorts out which companies survive and which fail. However, he says, our financial system is extremely complex and interconnected, and financial conditions are fragile, so the sudden failure of Bear Stearns likely "would have led to a chaotic unwinding of positions in those markets and could have severely shaken confidence." (:30)
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