Ben Bernanke
Chair of the US Federal Reserve 2006–14, Nobel Prize in Economics 2022
Born 1953
Photo: United States Federal Reserve · Public domain
«The Great Depression is the holy grail of macroeconomics.»
Ben Bernanke chaired the US Federal Reserve through the 2008 financial crisis, drawing on a lifetime of research into the Great Depression to justify interventions on an unprecedented scale. He won the 2022 Nobel Prize in Economics for showing how bank failures turn recessions into depressions.
Key achievements
- Chair of the US Federal Reserve, 2006–2014
- Nobel Prize in Economics, 2022, for research on banking crises
- Chaired Princeton's economics department from 1996
Universities
Cambridge, Massachusetts
AB in economics, summa cum laude, 1975.
Cambridge, Massachusetts
PhD in economics, 1979, supervised by Stanley Fischer.
Stanford, California (next to Palo Alto)
Taught at the Graduate School of Business, 1979–85.
Princeton, New Jersey
Professor of economics, 1985–2002; chaired the department from 1996.
Facts
- He scored 1590 out of 1600 on the SAT and taught himself calculus because his high school in South Carolina did not offer it.
- His MIT dissertation on business cycles was supervised by Stanley Fischer, later governor of the Bank of Israel; his 1983 paper on the Depression argued that bank collapses cut off credit and deepen slumps.
- During the 2008 crisis he cut interest rates to near zero and launched quantitative easing, buying trillions of dollars of bonds to keep credit flowing.
- He shared the 2022 Nobel Prize with Douglas Diamond and Philip Dybvig for research on banks and financial crises.
Photographs
Photographs come from Wikimedia Commons under free licences; the author and licence are shown on each image.