- Person
- Ben Bernanke
- Lived
- b. 1953
- Field
- Economics
- From
- American
The story
Ben Bernanke spent eight years as chairman of the Federal Reserve, from February 2006 to January 2014, a period dominated by the financial crisis of 2007–2009 and the slow recovery that followed. After his second term ended and Janet Yellen succeeded him, he turned to explaining what had happened and what future officials should learn from it. In February 2014 he joined the Brookings Institution as a distinguished fellow in its Economic Studies program, and he has continued to write articles and books since.
In October 2015 he published The Courage to Act: A Memoir of a Crisis and its Aftermath, which became a New York Times bestseller. In it he described how close the world economy came to collapse in 2007 and 2008, and argued that the novel steps taken by the Fed, working with other US agencies and foreign governments, had prevented a catastrophe worse than the Great Depression.
He then joined the two Treasury secretaries he had worked alongside during the crisis, Henry Paulson, who served under President George W. Bush, and Timothy Geithner, who served under President Barack Obama. In 2019 the three wrote Firefighting: The Financial Crisis and Its Lessons, and in 2020 they published First Responders: Inside the U.S. Strategy for Fighting the 2007–2009 Global Financial Crisis. That year the pandemic tested those lessons again, and the Nobel committee later noted that major measures were taken to stop it turning into a global financial crisis.
His 2022 book, 21st Century Monetary Policy: The Federal Reserve from the Great Inflation to COVID-19, assesses the Fed's successes and failures over half a century. The New York Times review said the book was intended to help future generations of economic policymakers and probably would.
His service to his profession continued alongside the writing. In 2019 he served as president of the American Economic Association, and in 2020 he received the BBVA Foundation Frontiers of Knowledge Award in economics, finance and management. After sharing the 2022 Nobel Memorial Prize in Economic Sciences, he used his Nobel lecture, published in 2023, to set out how banking and credit shape economic fluctuations.
Why it matters
By documenting the crisis openly, Bernanke gave future central bankers a detailed guide to preventing and fighting financial panics.
About Ben Bernanke
Economist of the Great Depression who chaired the Federal Reserve through the 2008 financial crisis and shared the 2022 Nobel Prize in Economic Sciences for research on banks and crises.
More about Ben Bernanke
- Ben Bernanke won a Nobel for explaining bank collapsesBen Bernanke shared the 2022 Nobel economics prize for showing how bank runs turned the 1930s downturn into the deep and prolonged Great Depression.
- Ben Bernanke wrote textbooks that taught economics widelyBen Bernanke coauthored two economics textbooks, edited the American Economic Review and is among the 50 most published economists in the world.
- Ben Bernanke showed how credit crunches deepen recessionsIn a 1983 paper Ben Bernanke showed that the financial chaos of 1930–33 made credit scarce and costly, a mechanism later called the financial accelerator.
Sources
- Ben Bernanke Wikipedia
- Ben S. Bernanke Brookings Institution
- The Prize in Economic Sciences 2022: popular information NobelPrize.org
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