Bernanke is Scared

He just explicitly left the door open for another round of quantitative easing, or some similarly extreme measure:

The Federal Reserve chairman, Ben S. Bernanke, gave a subdued account of the economy’s health Wednesday and said that the Fed was prepared to expand its economic aid campaign once again, if necessary, though such a step was not imminent.

Less than a month has passed since Mr. Bernanke said at a press conference that the central bank intended to stand back and take the measure of the nation’s sluggish recovery. Wednesday’s remarks amounted to acknowledgment that so far, the news has been almost uniformly bad.

“I think we have to keep all the options on the table,” Mr. Bernanke said in testimony before the House Financial Services Committee. “We don’t know where the economy is going to go.”

This is about as close as you will ever hear a central banker get to saying that, "This scares the sh%$ out of me."