Federal Reserve Chairman Ben Bernanke wrote an op-ed for the Wall Street Journal in which he explained to Americans what he and the Treasury Department are doing about the crisis in the financial markets. Bernanke’s message: it took them some time, but they are now “laying the groundwork for recovery.”

“Our strategy will continue to evolve and be refined, and we will adapt to new developments and the inevitable setbacks. But we will not stand down until we have achieved our goals of repairing and reforming our financial system, and thereby restoring prosperity to our economy,” he wrote.

“Over the past year, the Federal Reserve has actively used all its powers and authority to try to help our economy through this difficult time. Central banks around the world have also consulted closely and cooperated in unprecedented ways to reduce strains in financial markets and to bolster our economies. We will continue to do so. However, clearly the time had come for a more comprehensive and broad-based solution,” Bernanke added.

“The most immediate responsibility of policy makers and elected officials is to restore confidence in our credit markets. Even as we do this, we must begin to consider long-term reforms that will mitigate similar crises in the future. A comprehensive review of our regulatory structures is an essential task in the coming year. The events of the past year or two have highlighted regulatory gaps and deficiencies that we must address to improve the structure of our markets and the resiliency of our economy. As we recover from the current crisis, it will be important to address these issues as soon as possible, to develop a regulatory structure that will better respond to future economic challenges.”

It is interesting that Bernanke does not touch upon the fact that a specific party pushed companies into lending money to individuals who could not pay the loan back, if bad times would arrive. For some reason, the focus seems to be on what individual companies did wrong, rather than on what US Congress did wrong. That’s undoubtedly an easy course for the Fed to pursue, especially if Bernanke wants to keep his job when Obama takes office in January 2009, but the fact of the matter is that ‘more regulation’ means that the ones who pushed companies into taking grand risks in the first place, will now suddenly decide what these companies can and cannot do.

That would be acceptable, as long as those politicians would indicate they have learned from their past mistakes, and if they would have taken responsibility for them. As it is, however, especially Democrats refuse to accept any responsibility.

It should also be pointed out that there another major reason for the financial crisis the culture of debt in the United Stats. It are not just politicians who believe the state can live on debt, it are also individual consumers who believe that borrowing money is a sound practice. It is not. Spend what you earn, and try to save some of it. When you save enough to afford something expensive, but it. Then start saving again.

A cultural change has to take place in America. Politicians can play a role in that process – for politicians are partially responsible for the culture in the first place, with Bush telling Americans after 9/11 that they had to do what they did best, namely consuming, meaning living on credit cards – but people have to take responsibility for their own actions, and their own bank accounts, just like companies and the government have to.

Bernanke is right to a large degree that the government has to act, but in order to act successfully, politicians have to learn from their past mistakes, and citizens have to stop pretending they are innocent and share no blame whatsoever. This should be pointed out by economic and political leaders until citizens have accepted it and have started to act on it. Behavioral and consumption practices have to change. If that does not happen, nothing that the government does will work in the long term.