Obama to nominate Bernanke.

Obama to nominate Bernanke for second term as Fed chairman. This is only natural. It's true, Bernanke is a Republican, and was nominated for his job by President G.W. Bush, but he is a RINO (republican in name only). I mean - if you didn't know his party affiliation you would never guess it from his policies. He fits like hand in glove with the Democratic credo of "print baby, print" more money.
Bernanke also did some succesful campaigning with his speech that said, modestly: "I, single handedly, killed the worst depression since the Great one". I think Ron Paul was more on the mark with this remark:

“The Federal Reserve, in collaboration with the giant banks, has created the greatest financial crisis the world has ever seen,” Representative Ron Paul, Republican of Texas, said at a House hearing last week in which Mr. Bernanke testified about the state of the economy.

Republican lawmakers portray the Fed as the embodiment of heavy-handed big government, and have called for scaling back the central bank’s regulatory powers.

Exactly. Bernanke's policies are the same as the ones recommended by Paul Krugman, the rabidly liberal (lefty) columnist of the NY Times. So, there's no wonder Obama renominated him. There are other reasons too: you don't change horses in mid race, and if anything goes wrong (which is sure to happen) you have a handy fall man.
While many, including the doom prophet Nuriel Roubini, praise Bernanke for indeed saving us from a big depression, other depression specialists, like Anna Jacobson Schwartz (Milton Friedman's co-author on the depression) have a very detailed and professional critique of his policies:

Mr. Bernanke seems to know only two amounts: zero and trillions. Before 2008 there were only moderate increases in the Federal Reserve’s aggregate balance sheet numbers, but since then the balance sheet has exploded by trillions of dollars. The increase was spurred by the Fed’s loans to troubled institutions and purchases of securities.

Why is easy monetary policy such a sin? Because in such an environment, loans are cheap and borrowers can finance every project that they dream up. This results in excesses, and also increases the severity of the recession that inevitably follows when the bubble bursts.

Roubini, though, beside praising Bernankes handling of the crisis once it happened, also states that Bernanke failed to do anything to prevent the crisis in the two years he reigned prior to it's outburst, when many, including Roubini, were predicting it.
I'm not optimistic about the economic recovery.

What caused the crisis

An incredible tale from an insider about the clueless, scandalous, ignorant way the banking system works.
"The era that defined Wall Street is finally, officially over. Michael Lewis, who chronicled its excess in Liar’s Poker, returns to his old haunt to figure out what went wrong."

"I’d never taken an accounting course, never run a business, never even had savings of my own to manage. I stumbled into a job at Salomon Brothers in 1985 and stumbled out much richer three years later, and even though I wrote a book about the experience, the whole thing still strikes me as preposterous—which is one of the reasons the money was so easy to walk away from. I figured the situation was unsustainable. Sooner rather than later, someone was going to identify me, along with a lot of people more or less like me, as a fraud. Sooner rather than later, there would come a Great Reckoning when Wall Street would wake up and hundreds if not thousands of young people like me, who had no business making huge bets with other people’s money, would be expelled from finance."
"I thought I was writing a period piece about the 1980s in America. Not for a moment did I suspect that the financial 1980s would last two full decades longer or that the difference in degree between Wall Street and ordinary life would swell into a difference in kind. I expected readers of the future to be outraged that back in 1986, the C.E.O. of Salomon Brothers, John Gutfreund, was paid $3.1 million; I expected them to gape in horror when I reported that one of our traders, Howie Rubin, had moved to Merrill Lynch, where he lost $250 million; I assumed they’d be shocked to learn that a Wall Street C.E.O. had only the vaguest idea of the risks his traders were running."

"Then came Meredith Whitney with news. Whitney was an obscure analyst of financial firms for Oppenheimer Securities who, on October 31, 2007, ceased to be obscure. On that day, she predicted that Citigroup had so mismanaged its affairs that it would need to slash its dividend or go bust. It’s never entirely clear on any given day what causes what in the stock market, but it was pretty obvious that on October 31, Meredith Whitney caused the market in financial stocks to crash. By the end of the trading day, a woman whom basically no one had ever heard of had shaved $369 billion off the value of financial firms in the market. Four days later, Citigroup’s C.E.O., Chuck Prince, resigned. In January, Citigroup slashed its dividend."

An amazing, long, story.