Chairman Bernanke

This is hearsay because I don't "do" monetary policy. But everything I've read says that Ben was extraordinarily creative and effective.

He had to find creative ways to get around a number of institutional constraints to do the needful and he did

The ultimate judgement will depend on the exit strategy and how easily the fed will return to a more rule-based policy.

I don't like the "informed postmortems" part. There is little agreement in macro.

Strong action as a lender of last resort was essential. This is what central banks do. In this instance, innovation by the Fed was crucial.

Future views of the past are hard to predict with precision. That said, things would probably have been much worse without the Feds actions

Fed could have been even more aggressive. Could have recognized problems in shadow banking system earlier. But hindsight is 20/20.

Let's see how the unwinding works. Also, some of the policies had bad income-distribution consequences and some were fiscal policies.

No Ben, no avoiding depression. Full stop.

The counterfactual state of the world with muted, Fed responses is an ugly one.

Generally true. Some doubts about whether it would have been possible to impose haircuts on debtholders rather than use public funds.

A policy where the Fed let financial institutions go bankrupt or helped home-owners directly might have been better, but we will never know

In retrospect, some responses seem prescient, others misguided or based on false premises. Phil Swagel's paper is a great read on this.
-see background information here

It is hard to have confidence on this opinion. It is difficult to predict how history will play out; this is not just "economic" predictions

The financial crisis was a solvency crisis. The Bernanke (and Paulson) actions were instrumental in keeping the financial sector solvent.

Public may not appreciate this, but Bernanke's Fed helped stave off Depression 2.0. Record before and after will be more controversial.

-see background information here

We'll never know the counterfactual, but there is reason to believe that Ben Bernanke helped avert disaster, despite an ineffective Congress

Important not to forget how dire the situation was at that time.

More subjective than most questions. Likely that economists will disagree about this in the future. But I judge Bernanke's actions favorably

Bernanke understood very well the policy errors of the Fed during the Great Depression and had the courage to avoid repeating them.

Hard to predict what hindsight will suggest, but it think he did well in extremely difficult times.