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Ben Bernanke
b. 1953 Tier I
A drugstore kid from Dillon who taught himself calculus
The Bernankes reached Dillon, South Carolina in the 1940s, where his grandfather bought a drugstore that his father Philip and an uncle ran and where his mother Edna gave up teaching to work the counter. Theirs was one of a handful of Jewish families in town, and he learned Hebrew from a grandfather who was a cantor. Dillon High School offered no calculus, so he taught it to himself. He played saxophone in the marching band, finished as valedictorian, scored 1590 on the SAT and reached the National Spelling Bee in 1965. Summers he worked construction on a hospital and waited tables at South of the Border, the roadside attraction up the highway. Harvard took him, and MIT gave him a doctorate in 1979.
He taught at Stanford's business school from 1979, then moved to Princeton and chaired its economics department from 1996 to 2002. The work that mattered was a 1983 paper arguing that the Depression deepened not only because the money supply collapsed but because failing banks destroyed the relationships that make lending possible. At a conference for Milton Friedman's 90th birthday on November 8, 2002, by then a Federal Reserve governor, he put it without hedging: regarding the Great Depression, you are right, we did it, we are very sorry, and thanks to you we will not do it again. He chaired the Council of Economic Advisers from June 2005, took the Fed chairmanship on February 1, 2006, and had 20 months before the credit markets did what he had spent a career studying.
The rescue made him the most attacked technocrat in the country, and the attacks came from both flanks. Congress and much of the public saw a central bank lending to the institutions that had caused the damage. From the other direction, Anna Schwartz, whose book with Friedman was the foundation of his own scholarship, wrote in the New York Times in July 2009 under the headline Man Without a Plan and advised Barack Obama not to reappoint him. Bernie Sanders put a hold on the nomination. When the Senate confirmed him for a second term on January 28, 2010, the vote was 70 to 30, the narrowest margin any Federal Reserve chairman had received to that point. Time had named him Person of the Year six weeks earlier.
He left the Fed on January 31, 2014, joined the Brookings Institution, published a memoir of the crisis in 2015 and a history of modern monetary policy in 2022, and advised Citadel and PIMCO. In October 2022 he shared the Nobel Memorial Prize in Economic Sciences with Douglas Diamond and Philip Dybvig, cited not for the rescue but for the 1983 paper that had explained why one would be needed. The verdict on the rescue itself is not settled. The tools he made ordinary, near-zero rates and large-scale asset purchases, were still being argued over when inflation returned in 2021 and 2022. South Carolina named an interstate interchange for him in 2009.
Lifespan
Ben Bernanke's life against the full span of the corpus — the fading end marks a life still in progress.
Notable works
-
Non-Monetary Effects of the Financial Crisis in the Propagation of the Great Depression
article
American Economic Review — the paper the Nobel committee cited 1983 -
Inflation Targeting: Lessons from the International Experience
book
With Laubach, Mishkin and Posen 2001 -
Essays on the Great Depression
book
His Depression scholarship collected 2004 -
Large-scale asset purchase programs
other
Quantitative easing, in rounds, from 2008 onward 2008 -
The Courage to Act
book
His own account of the crisis and its aftermath 2015 -
21st Century Monetary Policy
book
A history of the Federal Reserve from the 1950s forward 2022
Life in brief
with age at each point- 1965 aged ~12 Reaches the National Spelling Bee as South Carolina champion
- 1975 aged ~22 Graduates from Harvard summa cum laude in economics
- 1979 aged ~26 Takes a doctorate at MIT and joins the Stanford business faculty
- 1996 aged ~43 Becomes chair of the Princeton economics department
- November 8, 2002 aged 48 Tells Milton Friedman the Fed caused the Depression and will not repeat it He was a Federal Reserve governor at the time and said so on the record.
- February 1, 2006 aged 52 Sworn in as the 14th chairman of the Federal Reserve
- December 16, 2009 aged 56 Named Time's Person of the Year
- January 28, 2010 aged 56 Confirmed for a second term by 70 votes to 30 The narrowest margin any Fed chairman had received to that point.
- October 10, 2022 aged 68 Shares the Nobel Memorial Prize in Economic Sciences
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