authorities expressed "strong views" but said he would not characterize their stance as improper. AIG bailout According to a January 26, 2010, column in The Huffington Post, a whistleblower has disclosed documents providing troubling details' of Bernanke's role in the AIG bailout". Republican Senator Jim Bunning of Kentucky said on CNBC that he had seen documents which show that Bernanke overruled recommendations from his staff in bailing out AIG. The columnist says this raises questions as to whether or not the decision to bail out AIG was necessary. Senators from both parties who support Bernanke say his actions averted worse problems and outweighed whatever responsibility this may have created for the financial crisis. Edward Quince The crisis in 2008 also made Ben Bernanke create a pseudonym, Edward Quince. According to the Wall Street Journal, the false name was evidence in a class-action lawsuit against the government by shareholders of AIG, which had been given a Fed-backed bailout when it was near collapse. One of Mr. Quince's emails reads, "We think they are days from failure. They think it is a temporary problem. This disconnect is dangerous." Upon the revelation of the Quince pseudonym during the Starr v. United States trial, The New York Times created a cocktail inspired by Mr. Bernanke's chosen alias: the "Rye & Quince." Economic views Bernanke has given several lectures at the London School of Economics on monetary theory and policy. He has written two textbooks: an intermediate-level macroeconomics textbook coauthored with Andrew Abel (and also Dean Croushore in later editions) and an introductory textbook, covering both microeconomics and macroeconomics, coauthored with Robert H. Frank. Bernanke was the Director of the Monetary Economics Program of the National Bureau of Economic Research and the editor of the American Economic Review. He is among the 50 most published economists in the world according to IDEAS/RePEc. Bernanke is particularly interested in the economic and political causes of the Great Depression, on which he has published numerous academic journal articles. Before Bernanke's work, the dominant monetarist theory of the Great Depression was Milton Friedman's view that it had been largely caused by the Federal Reserve's having reduced the money supply and has on several occasions argued that one of the biggest mistakes made during the period was to raise interest rates too early. In a speech on Milton Friedman's ninetieth birthday (November 8, 2002), Bernanke said: "Let me end my