This article is mostly for entertainment. We all feel as though the low interest rate, easy money policies of the Fed and other central banks will come back to hurt the domestic and overall economies of the world and  just because it hasn’t happened yet does not mean it never will.

I find it amusing that these central bankers are all so defensive when someone challenges their policies. They are all reading from the same playbook but that will not last forever.

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The author of this post is William D. Cohan. A former senior mergers and acquisitions banker who has written three books about Wall Street. His latest book is “The Price of Silence: The Duke Lacrosse Scandal, the Power of the Elite, and the Corruption of Our Great Universities.”

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By the end of our recent conversation, Ben S. Bernanke, the former chairman of the Federal Reserve, and I had a gentleman’s bet. I believe the easy money policies he pushed for and put in place while serving as Fed chairman starting in 2008 (and that remain in place under his successor, Janet L. Yellen) will lead inevitably to a near-term financial crisis; he thinks that idea is beyond ridiculous.

Mr. Bernanke championed the twin policies of keeping short-term interest rates near zero, for seven years, and of quantitative easing, in which the Fed bought $4 trillion of squirrelly debt securities in the market and stuck them on its balance sheet – pushing all interest rates down to historically low levels. My argument is essentially that those policies have created the equivalent of a global hunger games for greater yield, forcing investors to hunt rapaciously for riskier, higher-yielding investments because safer options, such as those found in a savings account, a certificate of deposit or a Treasury bond, offer them only a pittance.

In the resulting investor melee, risk has been mispriced, creating a bubble and inflating the price of financial assets, such as those for debt and equity securities, corporate loans and leveraged loans — to say nothing of real estate, art and college tuition.

The dizzying upward push in the prices of these assets is unsustainable, I suggested to him, and would lead to the next financial crisis as the bubble that the Fed helped to create popped. For what it’s worth, this view is not just mine alone: It is also shared by, among others, a diverse group of smart people such as David Stockman, the former budget director for President Reagan; Kevin Warsh, a former Fed governor whom Mr. Bernanke thanks in his new best-selling memoir “The Courage to Act”; and Stanley Druckenmiller, the billionaire former hedge fund manager.

Mr. Bernanke would have none of it, and seemed irritated at the very suggestion that the policies he introduced while Federal Reserve chairman would come to a bad end. Rather, he argued, the Fed’s easy money policies kept a bad financial situation from getting worse. In effect, he is saying, he deserves praise, not criticism.

He dismissed Mr. Druckenmiller as a mere “great investor” who should be disqualified from further comment because he predicted that the Fed’s policies in 2008 and 2009 would lead to “hyperinflation,” which has not happened. He dismissed Mr. Warsh, a former Wall Street investment banker, as “not an economist.” He seemed generally dismissive of noneconomists. One can only imagine what he thinks of me.

By this point, our pleasant conversation had turned a little testy. “The low rate of interest isn’t something that God gave us here,” he explained. “It’s something that is a feature of the economy. There’s a lot of savings in the world looking for a relatively small number of good-return investments, and so the equilibrium real interest rate in the economy is very, very low.”

He said the Fed could have done two things: It could have moved interest rates toward “the equilibrium rate,” which is the rate that encourages job creation and full employment, or it could have raised rates above the equilibrium rate, which he argued would have pushed the economy back into recession.

“Think about what is the Fed’s alternative,” he said. “The Fed could raise interest rates prematurely — could’ve raised rates in 2009 — but the economy would’ve gone back into recession. They would’ve had to cut rates again. They wouldn’t have been able to sustain higher rates. The only way to get higher rates is if the economy is recovering.”

I suggested that perhaps the zero interest rate policy had gone on for too long, because the unemployment rate, now 5 percent, was below the 6.5 percent target rate that Mr. Bernanke himself had set for the Fed to consider ending the policy.

That set him off, too. “No, no, no, no, no, no, we never did that,” he countered. “We said we would not raise rates at least – very clearly, many times – at least until unemployment got to 6.5 percent. We never said we would when it got to 6.5 percent. We never said that.”

He then explained “the correct way” to look at the situation: There is a target interest rate that is consistent with full employment. “And for most of the recovery,” he said, “that number was actually negative. Any economist can explain why it would’ve been negative at that point. So what the Fed was trying to do was get market rates down towards the interest rate that was consistent with full employment.

“That’s why, yes, the policy did lower interest rates — that’s right — but even after lowering them, they were still too high. They were too high because of the zero lower bound. They were too high to get to the rate that was consistent with growth and recovery. If the Fed had not done what it did, we would still be in a much worse position.”

He said that it was “a red herring” that quantitative easing or the zero interest rate policy helped make the rich richer and hurt the 45 million Americans who rely on their savings to get by. “I think it helped everybody,” he said. “In particular, if we hadn’t done it, then we wouldn’t have gotten whatever 11 or 12 million jobs created, and that helps the middle class and the working class. That’s the most important thing you can do for them.”

He conceded there was too much inequality in the United States today but denied that the Fed was to blame.

“It’s been going on for a long time,” he said. “It’s been increasing since the 1970s. It’s due to globalization, technical change — a whole bunch of long-term trends. The Fed’s effects on inequality are modest and temporary, and the fact that the Fed’s policies created jobs means that the absolute benefits for the working class are very substantial.”

He said the blame for the extended period of low interest rates belonged with Congress, not with the Fed.

“Go complain to Congress because the fiscal policy turned very contractionary, which meant the Fed had to bear the entire burden of creating a recovery,” he continued. “If fiscal policy had been more balanced, then we could’ve had the same recovery with higher interest rates. But because fiscal policy was contractionary, and Congress said essentially, ‘The Fed will take care of it,’ then the Fed could use the only tool it had.”

Even if quantitative easing and the zero interest rate policy did benefit the wealthy, “what should the Fed have done?” he asked. “Not kept interest rates low? So, increase rates early on? I don’t understand what the alternative would be.”

And what about the asset-price bubble, the subject of our wager? He said he was not worried that prices of some assets had increased. What he does worry about, he said, is that when the Fed inevitably raises interest rates, the economic recovery in the United States could “falter” in the face of “headwinds” from the still weak global economy.

“The concerns I would have are not about asset bubbles or inequality,” he said. “The concerns I would have is, what’s the right moment to raise rates from the point of view of sustaining the economic recovery? That’s the tough call that Janet and her team there are trying to make. Fortunately for me, I’m no longer required to make it.”

But he will owe me a beer when the next financial crisis hits, sooner than anyone would like.