Fed boss: It will take years for jobs to come back

WASHINGTON — Federal Reserve Chairman Ben Bernanke strongly defended the U.S. central bank’s bond-buying stimulus before Congress on Tuesday, saying its benefits clearly exceed possible costs. The Fed chairman also urged lawmakers to avoid sharp spending cuts set to go into effect on Friday, which he warned could combine with earlier tax increases to create a “significant headwind” for the economic recovery.

CHICAGO — U.S. Federal Reserve Chairman Ben Bernanke said on Friday that the shadow banking system still posed a threat to financial stability, and funding markets might still not be able to cope with a major default. In a wide-ranging speech explaining the Fed’s role in monitoring the health of the banking system, Bernanke also laid out how the central bank was looking at asset markets closely for signs of excessive risk taking.

Haruhiko Kuroda showed Wednesday he’s following in the footsteps of Ben Bernanke and Mario Draghi as he swung the Bank of Japan from incremental moves to unprecedented stimulus at the governor’s first policy meeting. The BOJ will double the monetary base by the end of 2014 through buying government bonds, the central bank said in Tokyo, in Japan’s biggest round of quantitative easing. JPMorgan Chase & Co. said the Japanese and U.S. central banks are now “in the same camp” when it comes to monetary stimulus.

Martin Hutchinson submits: Since last November, the U.S. Federal Reserve has been buying U.S. Treasury bonds at a rate of about $75 billion a month. That's part of Fed Chairman Ben S. Bernanke's "QE2" program, under which the central bank was to buy $600 billion of the government bonds.But QE2 ended Thursday), meaning the Fed will no longer be a big buyer of Treasury bonds. So starting today, the U.S. Treasury needs to sell twice as many Treasury bonds to end investors as it had been.