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'Ben Shalom Bernanke'^[1] (born December 13, 1953) (pronounced er-NAN-kee, ər-'nan-kē or ), is an American economist and current Chairman of the Board of Governors of the United States Federal Reserve. He was previously Chairman of the U.S. President's Council of Economic Advisers (CEA), and member of the Board of Governors of the Federal Reserve System.
On October 24, 2005, President George W. Bush nominated Bernanke to succeed Alan Greenspan as Chairman of the Federal Reserve. Bernanke was sworn in on February 1, 2006 after the Senate's confirmation by a voice vote on January 31, 2006.

Contents

Early life

Career

Awards and fellowships

Bibliography

References

Footnotes

External links

Early life

Bernanke was born in Augusta, Georgia and grew up in Dillon, South Carolina as the eldest of three children, with a younger brother and sister. His father Philip was a pharmacist and part-time theater manager, and his mother Edna was originally a schoolteacher. They were one of the few Jewish families in the area, attending a local synagogue called Ohav Shalom; as a child, Bernanke learned Hebrew from his maternal grandfather Jonas, who was a professional Torah reader and Hebrew teacher.^[2] His father and uncle co-owned and managed a drugstore which they had bought from his grandfather, who had immigrated to the United States from Austria after World War I and moved to Dillon from New York in the 1940s.^[3]
He was educated at East Elementary, J.V. Martin Junior High, and Dillon High School, where he was a high achieving pupil. He taught himself calculus, edited the school newspaper, was class valedictorian and achieved the highest SAT score in the state that year — 1590 out of 1600^[4]. He was also the All-State saxophonist, playing in the school's marching band^[5].

Career

On leaving high school in 1971 he enrolled at Harvard University, where he spent his undergraduate years in Winthrop House and graduated summa cum laude with a B.A. in economics in 1975. He received a PhD in economics from the Massachusetts Institute of Technology in 1979. He taught at the Stanford Graduate School of Business from 1979 until 1985, was a visiting professor at New York University and went on to become a tenured professor at Princeton University in the Department of Economics. He chaired that department from 1996 until September 2002, when he went on public service leave. He resigned his position at Princeton July 1, 2005.^[6] He has given several lectures at the London School of Economics on monetary theory and policy and has written three textbooks on macroeconomics, and one on microeconomics. He was the Director of the Monetary Economics Program of the National Bureau of Economic Research and the editor of the American Economic Review.
Bernanke is particularly interested in the economic and political causes of the Great Depression, on which he has written extensively. On Milton Friedman's ninetieth birthday, Nov. 8, 2002, he stated: "Let me end my talk by abusing slightly my status as an official representative of the Federal Reserve. I would like to say to Milton and Anna: Regarding the Great Depression. You're right, we did it. We're very sorry. But thanks to you, we won't do it again."
^[7]
[8]
[9]
In 2002, when the word "deflation" began appearing in the business news, Bernanke gave a speech about deflation. In that speech, he mentioned that the government in a fiat money system owns the physical means of creating money. Control of the means of production for money implies that the government can always avoid deflation by simply issuing more money. (He referred to a statement made by Milton Friedman about using a "helicopter drop" of money into the economy to fight deflation.) Bernanke's critics have since referred to him as "Helicopter Ben" or to his "helicopter printing press". In a footnote to his speech, Bernanke noted that "people know that inflation erodes the real value of the government's debt and, therefore, that it is in the interest of the government to create some inflation." ^[10]
He is believed to be less ideologically rigid than Alan Greenspan and has been reluctant to weigh in on political issues. For example, while Greenspan publicly supported President Clinton's deficit reduction plan and the Bush tax cuts, Bernanke, when questioned about taxation policy, said that it was none of his business, his exclusive remit being monetary policy, and said that fiscal policy and wider society related issues were what politicians were for and got elected for. Indeed, in his undergraduate economics textbooks he somewhat distances himself from the overt economic libertarianism of Greenspan and stresses that Adam Smith was in fact quite concerned about things like relative inequality.
His first months as chairman of the Fed were marked by difficulties communicating with the media. An advocate of more transparent Fed policy, he had to back away from his initial idea of stating clearer inflation goals as such statements tended to drastically affect the stock market. Maria Bartiromo disclosed on CNBC their private conversation on Fed policy, and he has since been criticized for making public statements about Fed direction.^[11] He was also lambasted by James Cramer of CNBC on August 3, 2007 for his seeming indifference to the housing correction and the subsequent credit contagion affecting the credit markets.^[12]

Awards and fellowships

★ Fellow, Econometric Society (1997)

Bibliography

★ Essays on the Great Depression, Ben Bernanke, , , Princeton University Press, 2005, ISBN 0-691-11820-5

★ Inflation Targeting: Lessons from the International Experience, Ben Bernanke, Thomas Laubach, Frederic Mishkin, and Adam Posen, , , Princeton University Press, 2005, ISBN 0-691-08689-3

★ "The Federal Funds Rate and the Channels of Monetary Transmission", Ben Bernanke and Alan Blinder, , , Economic Review, 1992

★ "Macroeconomics", Andrew B. Abel, Ben S. Bernanke, , , Addison Wesley, 2001, ISBN 0-201-44133-0

★ "Principles of Macro Economics", Ben S. Bernanke, Robert H. Frank, , , McGraw Hill, 2007, ISBN-13: 978-0-07-319397-7

★ "Principles of Micro Economics", Ben S. Bernanke, Robert H. Frank, , , McGraw Hill, 2007, ISBN-13: 978-0-07-319398-4

References

★ Andrews, Edmund L. (Nov. 5, 2005). "All for a more open Fed". ''New Straits Times'', p. 21.

Footnotes

1. Bernanke's first name is Ben, not Benjamin; it is not an abbreviated name. (ref: "Big Ben", ''Slate'', October 24, 2005)
2. [1]
3. [2] Bernanke's mother often worked there as well, having given up her job as a schoolteacher when he was born, and Bernanke himself also assisted from time to time.[http://www.federalreserve.gov/boarddocs/speeches/2006/20060901/default.htm
4. [http://www.washingtonpost.com/wp-dyn/content/article/2005/11/14/AR2005111401544.html
5. [3]
6. [4]Bernanke Biography
7. [5]
8. [6]
9. [7]
10. [8]
11. [9]
12. [10]

External links

★ Bernanke Biography at whitehouse.gov

★ Bernanke Takes the Reins - Yale Economic Review

★ "A Crash Course for Central Bankers" by Ben Bernanke in ''Foreign Policy''

★ "Downside Danger" by Ben Bernanke in ''Foreign Policy''

★ Bernanke's Princeton homepage

★ Bernanke's "printing press" speech

★ Address by Bernanke titled "Skills, Ownership, and Economic Security" with summary, video, and transcript.

★ Bernanke steps into Greenspan's big shoes - ''The Economist'' Global Agenda

★ At the Fed, an Unknown Became a Safe Choice - ''The New York Times''

★ The Ben Bernanke Grand Experiment

★ Describes his early years

★ Bernanke Papers and Sources

★ Bernanke's FED Speeches and Papers The collected speeches given and papers written while at the FED.