Ben Bernanke was right. When the American economy was in free fall in late 2008, Bernanke, then chairman of the Federal Reserve, pushed a program called quantitative easing, or QE — basically printing money to pump trillions of dollars into the economy by buying government bonds and mortgage-backed securities. There were three periods of QE over the next six years. This week, the Fed, now under Janet Yellen, announced that this era is over; this month's huge purchase of bonds was to be the last. Although the U.S. economy still has a long way to go, imagine where it would be if Bernanke's harshest critics had been in charge.

The federal budget deficit

$1.4T The federal budget deficit in fiscal 2009

$469B The projected deficit for fiscal 2015 by the nonpartisan Congressional Budget Office.

Unemployment

10.2% Unemployment rate in October 2009

5.9% Current unemployment rate

The value of the dollar

$1.27Exchange rate with euro in November 2008

$1.26 Current exchange rate with euro

Among economists, agreement

90 Percentage of leading economists — of all stripes — surveyed who agree or strongly agree that "informed postmortems of Ben Bernanke's Fed chairmanship will judge favorably the Fed's creative and aggressive policy initiatives from autumn 2008 through early 2009."

0 Percentage who disagree, according to a weighted survey by the Initiative on Global Markets at the University of Chicago. (Nine percent weren't sure.)