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Bubble watcher: Neither Mr. Bernanke nor his predecessor, Alan Greenspan, believed that the Federal Reserve could identify asset price bubbles or do much about them, especially with interest rates (“a blunt tool” for that purpose, as Mr. Bernanke said). Yet in both of their cases, we know that they were warned of the housing bubble by (a precious few) colleagues. The economist Dean Baker was showing me graphs of home prices diverging from rental prices in a novel and scary pattern back in 2002!

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Bank regulator: Here’s something I learned during my stint at the White House during the financial crisis. To bail out banks invokes deep moral hazard, which makes such moves both deservedly unpopular and bad economics (“moral hazard” exists when an economic actor or institution doesn’t face the cost of its actions, like when you bail out a bank that screwed up). But given the global interconnectedness of financial institutions — and connectedness, not size, is the relevant and threatening factor here — the Fed (and Congress) could easily be back in the bailout business unless proactive steps are taken.

In other words, avoiding moral hazard is a luxury you often don’t have once the implosion has begun. So your best move is to avoid it.
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Consumer ally: The next Fed chief must learn to love and work closely with the Consumer Financial Protection Bureau. I’d recommend a standing lunch date with Richard Cordray, the agency’s first director and someone with sharp antennae for credit irregularities that can serve as early warnings for bubbles.

Macro-manager: This is huge, of course, and the challenges here are well known. Mr. Bernanke, aided by Ms. Yellen, has been consistently strong in using both traditional interest rate policy and creative asset purchasing and forward guidance methods in the pursuit of closing persistent output gaps.
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Better forecaster:
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Communicator
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