Bankers Have Their Own Fun With Brackets

Bankers generally aren't regarded as the most fun-loving bunch. So what hundreds of financial professionals did behind closed doors during a three-day convention in Austin, Texas, last week may surprise you.

Rather than lamenting the difficulty of imposing new fees and charges -- or confronting the public relations challenges created by groups like Occupy Wall Street -- hundreds of bankers used handheld voting devices to weigh in on something really important. They held a March Madness-style tournament matching some of the country's top financial players against one another to decide who should run the economy.

Hundreds of bankers, most of them representing large and midsized banks, responded to the question at the Consumer Bankers Association convention, where organizers created their own Economic Championship bracket. More than 1,500 votes were cast during the tournament.

The players included Fed Chairman Ben Bernanke (the top seed), Berkshire Hathaway chairman and CEO Warren Buffett, Treasury Secretary Tim Geithner, JPMorgan Chase president and CEO Jamie Dimon, Hewlett-Packard president and CEO Meg Whitman, the billionaire investor George Soros, former Federal Deposit Insurance Corp. Chairman Sheila Bair, and the financial adviser and television personality Suze Orman.

In the first round, Bernanke trounced Orman by a margin of 88.3% to 11.7%. Dimon defeated Whitman, 79.8% to 20.2%. Geithner beat Soros, 64.6% to 35.4%, and Bair pulled an upset over Buffett, 50.8% to 49.2%.

In the second round, Bernanke beat Dimon, 52.6% to 47.4%, while Geithner slipped past Bair, 50.1% to 49.9%.

In the final round, Bernanke decisively beat Geithner by a vote of 81.5% to 18.5%. Maybe those free lectures Bernanke is putting on the Fed's Website are giving him some added celebrity.

He delivered two such lectures last week at the George Washington University School of Business, and he plans to deliver two more this week. The most important message for investors so far seems to be in the first lecture in the series. Bernanke stressed that he is in no rush to raise interest rates, no matter how well the economy seems to be performing.