Ben Bernanke’s term as chairman ends on January 13, 2014.

In a TV interview with Charlie Rose, President Obama said that Mr. Bernanke “has already stayed a lot longer than he wanted or he was supposed to.”

The Wall Street Journal reports that many of Mr. Bernanke’s friends and associates say he wants to step down. In January Bernanke will have headed the Federal Reserve for eight years.

The Wall Street Journal continues that “the Obama administration is assembling a short list of candidates to lead the Federal Reserve, in expectation that chairman Bernanke won’t seek reappointment when his second term at the central bank ends.”

Who’s Next?

The White House hasn’t divulged any names, but here are a few names rumored to be in the running (in no particular order):

Janet Yellen, Federal Reserve vice chairwoman and right hand of Mr. Bernanke
Lawrence Summers, U.S. economist and Harvard University professor (more below)
Timothy Geithner, former Treasury Secretary
Roger Ferguson, president and chief executive of TIAA-CREFF
Alan Blinder, former Fed vice chairman and Princeton professor
Christina Romer, former head of Mr. Obama’s Council of Economic Advisers

Charles Ferguson, author of the book (and documentary) Inside Job describes Larry Summers as: “a compromised man who owes most of his fortune and much of his political success to the financial services industry, and who was involved in some of the most disastrous economic policy decisions of the past half century. In the Obama administration, Summers opposed strong measures to sanction bankers or curtail their income.”

Summers served as Bill Clinton’s Treasury Secretary where he oversaw passages of the Gramm-Leach-Bliley Act. This act paved the way for many of the mergers that created too big to fail banks.

Based on his resume, Summers would be best suited to continue the Fed's course of coddling Wall Street.