Ben Bernanke dollar (Photo credit: Gage Skidmore)

Following is the extract from the Speech of Mr. Ben Bernanke:

He characterized subprime mortgages as a “trigger” of the crisis, but “vulnerabilities” — like a lack of oversight and regulations — were also largely to blame for amplifying the financial shocks, he said.As a result of the crisis, the Federal Reserve has since taken steps to strengthen its supervision of banks. Bernanke pointed to the Fed’s stress tests of the largest U.S. banks as an example of one improvement, but otherwise didn’t get into many specifics.”We want financial firms to be able to not only assess the current value of their portfolio, but we also want to understand where they would be under severe scenarios,” he said. (via Bernanke: Lack of oversight worsened crisis – Apr. 13, 2012.)

The words marked in italics forced me to check my English vocabulary and then grammar. Wiktionay defines oversight as “An omission; something that is left out, missed or forgotten. ” So the lack of oversight would mean that Fed should have overlooked something but it did not. Next word is Regulations. The complete phrase would be ‘lack of Regulations’. Now there can not be Regulations if you actually intend to overlook something. I have checked other websites. All carry the similar phrase.Here is the search result. Would somebody please stand up and tell me what he actually meant?

Welcome to the clearly ambiguous 21st Century!

© Sandeep Bhalla