FEDERAL Reserve Chairman Ben Bernanke on Friday stopped short of detailing further action to boost the U.S. recovery but said the central bank would consider what more it could do to fight high unemployment, giving some comfort to investors.

    Bernanke said the Fed had marked down its outlook for U.S. economic growth and announced it would extend its September policy meeting to two days to consider its options. But he said the onus for boosting long-term growth prospects lay at the feet of the White House and the U.S. Congress.

    “It is clear the recovery from the crisis has been much less robust than we had hoped,” he told an annual Fed conference.

    Under Bernanke’s leadership, the U.S. central bank launched an unprecedented array of measures to steer the economy away from what could have been a second Great Depression.

    A weak raft of data has led analysts to say chances of a new recession could range as high as 50 percent.

    The economy grew at a paltry 1 percent annual rate in the second quarter, the government said Friday, after expanding only 0.4 percent during the first three months of the year. At the same time, Europe is strangled by a debt crisis that is undercutting recovery there.

    “The growth fundamentals of the United States do not appear to have been permanently altered by the shocks of the past four years,” Bernanke said.

    “The economic healing will take a while, and there may be setbacks along the way,” he added. “However ... the healing process should not leave major scars.”

    His optimism carried an important caveat. He said if policymakers failed to bring down the “extraordinarily” high level of U.S. long-term unemployment, jobs skills could atrophy, harming the economy’s long-run potential.

    The jobless rate stood at 9.1 percent in July, with nearly half of the unemployed out of work for 27 weeks or more.

    Financial markets gave a volatile reception to Bernanke’s speech; some participants had expected fresh details on steps the Fed could take to spur stronger growth.

    Bernanke made plain the central bank’s policy-setting Federal Open Market Committee, which next meets Sept. 20 and 21, found recent developments troubling. However, he said most policies that would ensure a solid foundation for long-term growth were outside the Fed’s province.

    (SD-Agencies)