“RENACCI: I know some people have asked in previous questions, but do you put uncertainty as a — as a concern? I mean, again, being a business owner in the past, uncertainty will cause a lockup. And we could talk about, you know, the government cutting costs and cutting jobs, but the private sector small-business owners create almost 67 percent of our jobs. We have to give them the certainty so they can create jobs.

BERNANKE: Well, you’re not interested in my Ph.D. thesis of 32 years ago, but it was entitled, “Uncertainty and Investment,” and it was about how uncertainty can reduce investment spending, and I believe that, but there are many kinds of uncertainty. There’s the uncertainty about regulation and those sorts of things. But there’s also uncertainty about whether this is a durable recovery.

People don’t know whether to invest or to hire because they don’t know whether this is — whether the recovery is going to continue.

So I think part of what we can do — obviously, we want to address the regulatory, trade, tax environment, absolutely fiscal environment. We also want to do whatever we can to make the economy grow faster and make people more confident.

I think we’ll see a dynamic going forward If, in fact, the economy begins to pick up some, I think confidence will improve because people will have more certainty about the sense that this will be a durable recovery. I think that’s a very important thing to be looking for.”