Ben Bernanke Is 'Time' Magazine's Person of the Year

Original post 7:44 AM: Every year around this time, media bloggers desperate to fill their daily post quotas find themselves speculating on who—or what—will be Time magazine's "Person of the Year," or POTY, in the increasingly Twitter-fied teenspeak that passes for writing online these days. The joke, of course, is that no one much cares who wins this honor, but all the speculation helps Time stoke the publicity flames and promote the 82-year-old concept cover.

That said, this year's Time Person of the Year is Fed Chairman Ben Bernanke, whom Michael Grunwald calls in an accompanying article "the most powerful nerd on the planet."

In an editor's letter, Time managing editor Richard Stengel explains, "We've rarely had such a perfect revision of the cliché that those who do not learn from history are doomed to repeat it. Bernanke didn't just learn from history; he wrote it himself and was damned if he was going to repeat it."

It's worth noting that while it was no Person of the Year, the magazine gave Bernanke's predecessor, Alan Greenspan—with Robert Rubin and Lawrence Summers for good measure—the cover treatment in 1999 under the now-hilarious headline The Committee to Save the World.

Maybe Marx had it backwards: Sometimes farce comes first, followed about a decade later by tragedy.

Update, 2:15 PM: Since Time's announcement this morning, reactions to Ben Bernanke as Person of the Year have been piling up. The New York Times' Paul Krugman took to his blog, the Conscience of a Liberal, to say, "The magazine cover curse is a well-known phenomenon: You should always short the stock of a company whose CEO is the subject of a glowing cover story in a major magazine."

Also in the Times, a post on the DealBook blog inspired this bit of verse from a commenter claiming to be science-fiction writer and poet Larry Eisneberg:

I dab at my eyes with a hankie,

So moved by Time’s choice of Bernanke,

His vision came late,

E’er the Bubble’d abate,

His lionizing makes me cranky!

Elsewhere, Reuter's Felix Salmon (formerly of Portfolio), wrote, "[Time's Michael] Grunwald himself has clearly decided that Bernanke is a hero, dismissing serious criticism of, say, the decision to let Lehman fail by simply saying that 'it’s not clear how the Fed could have saved Lehman without a buyer.' (Of course, there was a buyer—Barclays—and it’s precisely by stepping in with some short-term Bear-style financing that the Fed and Treasury could have allowed a smooth acquisition to proceed.)"

Reason's Jesse Walker quoted his own earlier assessment of Time's annual feature: "My hat goes off to Time—not for its selection, but for once more inspiring so many people to discuss the world's single vaguest annual award as though it were meaningful and important." Walker also jokes—at least it seems like a joke—that Bernanke is following in the "in the footsteps of you and Hitler by being named Time's person of the year."

Meanwhile, longtime Fed critic Representative Ron Paul told MSNBC's Joe Scarborough and Mika Brzezinski this morning on Morning Joe, "[Bernanke is] the most powerful man in the world…. I think he's more powerful than the president."

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Matt Haber is the media blogger for Portfolio.com.