When Ben S. Bernanke is sworn in for his second term as chairman of the Federal Reserve next year, his principal task will be coordinating the group of economists who shape the country’s monetary policy. But by the time it ends, Bernanke is likely to be running an entirely different organization, one with sweeping regulatory powers that some argue were never supposed to be part of the Fed’s mandate. If members of Congress agree both to his reappointment and to legislation formally establishing the Fed as the über-regulator of the entire financial system, Bernanke is odds-on favorite to become America’s first money czar.

The idea to create some kind of mechanism to oversee the health of the overall financial system—a systemic regulator—wins approval across the political spectrum: grudgingly, in some places; with applause and relief in others. “The status quo is completely unacceptable,” says Clayton Rose, a senior lecturer at the Harvard Business School and a former senior banker at JPMorgan Chase. “The world of regulation became fragmented, so regulators didn’t keep pace with all the changes in the institutions and markets” that they were supposed to be overseeing.

But should that systemic regulator be a single agency such as the Fed? That’s what the Obama administration proposes, and that would propel Bernanke into a position of unprecedented power. “God forbid,” says one former senior regulator, who now advises financial institutions. “If a single regulatory agency is created or designated, whoever heads that instantly has the most powerful job in the nation.” Enough people in Washington, he suggests, recall the extreme deference commanded by Bernanke’s predecessor, Alan Greenspan—deference that meant his ideas and arguments went largely unchallenged in Congressional hearings, allowing the subprime-lending bubble to expand to astronomic dimensions before bursting—that they will be reluctant to award still more power to any other Fed honcho, even Bernanke.

Ben Bernanke is no Alan Greenspan. The son of a pharmacist and a schoolteacher in South Carolina, Bernanke hasn’t tried to conform to the image of the Fed head as oracle or living legend that was created by the owlish Greenspan over the course of his tenure. Who could imagine Greenspan opening up about the Fed for the team at 60 Minutes? At the same time, Bernanke has won plaudits for dealing deftly with the recent financial crisis. Ironically, his scholarly work—which focused on the way that a credit squeeze that began in 1928 became a market slump and ultimately the Great Depression of the 1930s—proved more useful than anyone could have imagined back in 2006, when Bernanke replaced Greenspan at the helm of the central bank.