Today, Ben Bernanke is scheduled to give a speech at a banking conference in Atlanta on the state of the economy. My colleague, Tim Duy, has advice on what to listen for to get hints about where monetary policy might be headed, and I have a few more comments at the end. …More recently, in his press conference, Bernanke expressed confidence that QE2 had in fact worked. Will the evolution of activity this year cause him to reassess his confidence? Might he conclude that QE2 was not particularly effective? We know he already thought the tradeoffs for additional easing were less favorable than last fall, thus he set the ... (full story)