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Who2 Biography:

Ben Bernanke

, Economist / Government Official

  • Born: 13 December 1953
  • Birthplace: Augusta, Georgia
  • Best Known As: Chairman of the Federal Reserve Board, 2006-

Name at birth: Ben Shalom Bernanke

Ben Bernanke became chairman of the Federal Reserve Board in January of 2006. As chairman, he leads a board of seven governors of the Federal Reserve System (often called simply "the Fed"), which sets national monetary policy and serves as the central bank of the United States. Bernanke grew up in South Carolina and earned a bachelor's degree in economics from Harvard (1975) and a PhD in economics from the Massachusetts Institute of Technology (1979). He was a professor of economics at Stanford University from 1979 until 1985, when he moved to Princeton. Throughout the 1980s and 1990s he became increasingly involved in the Federal Reserve System, serving as a visiting scholar and academic advisor to several regional reserve banks. He remained at Princeton until 2002, when he left to become a Federal Reserve governor. In June of 2005 he was appointed by George W. Bush to be Chairman of the President's Council of Economic Advisers. When longtime Federal Reserve Board chairman Alan Greenspan retired in January of 2006, Bernanke became the new chairman. Bernanke has a 14-year term on the Fed board, which will last until 2020. His four-year term as chairman, which can be extended, ends on 31 January 2010. His books include Essays on the Great Depression (2000), and the textbooks Macroeconomics (1992, with Andrew B. Able) and Principles of Economics (2001, with Robert H. Frank).

Bernanke's official job title is Chairman of the Board of Governors of the Federal Reserve System... According to his Federal Reserve Board bio, Bernanke was born in Augusta, Georgia, but "grew up in Dillon, South Carolina." Augusta is the site of the annual major golf tournament known as The Masters... Bernanke married the former Anna Friedmann on 29 May 1978. They have two children: Joel (b. 1982) and Alyssa (b. 1986)... Bernanke won the South Carolina state spelling bee at age 11, according to a 2005 article in The Washington Post.

 
 
Investment Dictionary: Ben Bernanke

The chairman of the Board of Governors of the U.S. Federal Reserve who took over the helm from Alan Greenspan on February 1, 2006, ending 18 years of Greenspan's leadership at the Fed. A former Fed governor, Bernanke was chairman of the U.S. President's Council of Economic Advisers prior to being nominated as Greenspan's successor in late 2005.

Investopedia Says:
Born Benjamin Shalom Bernanke on December 13, 1953, he was the son of a pharmacist and a schoolteacher, and raised in southeastern United States. A high-achieving student, Bernanke completed his undergrad summa cum laude at Harvard University, then went on to complete his Ph.D. at MIT in 1979 by the age of 26. He taught economics at Stanford and then Princeton University until 2002, leaving his academic work for public service.

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Learn about the tools the Fed uses to influence interest rates and general economic conditions. Formulating Monetary Policy
What causes inflation? How does it affect your investments and standard of living? This tutorial has the answers. All About Inflation


 
Columbia Encyclopedia: Bernanke, Ben Shalom
(bĕrnăngk'ē) , 1953–, U.S. economist and government official, b. Augusta, Ga.; grad. Harvard (B.A., 1975), Massachusetts Institute of Technology (Ph.D., 1979). He was a professor of economics at Stanford Univ. (1979–85) and Princeton (1985–2002) before serving (2003–5) as a member of the Federal Reserve's board of governors. An authority on monetary policy, he became (2005) chairman of the White House Council of Economic Advisers under President George W. Bush. In 2006 Bernanke succeeded Alan Greenspan as chairman of the Federal Reserve Board.
 
Wikipedia: Ben Bernanke
Ben S. Bernanke
Ben Bernanke

Incumbent
Assumed office 
February 1, 2006
Preceded by Alan Greenspan
Succeeded by Incumbent

Born December 13 1953 (1953--) (age 53)
Augusta, Georgia
Nationality American
Spouse Anna Friedmann
Alma mater A.B. Economics, Harvard College

Ph.D. Economics, Massachusetts Institute of Technology

Profession Macroeconomist

Ben Shalom Bernanke[1] (born December 13, 1953) (pronounced \ber-NAN-kee\, \bər-'nan-kē\ or \bɚ.ˈnæn.ki\), 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 appointed 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.


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 College, 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[citation needed].

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. Cramer then referred to him as "the great chairman" after his rates cut on September 18, 2007. [12]


Awards and fellowships

  • Fellow, Econometric Society (1997)

Bibliography

  • Ben Bernanke (2005). Essays on the Great Depression. Princeton University Press. ISBN 0-691-11820-5. 
  • Ben Bernanke, Thomas Laubach, Frederic Mishkin, and Adam Posen (2005). Inflation Targeting: Lessons from the International Experience. Princeton University Press. ISBN 0-691-08689-3. 
  • Ben Bernanke and Alan Blinder (1992). ""The Federal Funds Rate and the Channels of Monetary Transmission"". Economic Review 82, no. 4: 901–921. 
  • Andrew B. Abel, Ben S. Bernanke (2001). "Macroeconomics". Addison Wesley. ISBN 0-201-44133-0. 
  • Ben S. Bernanke, Robert H. Frank (2007). "Principles of Macro Economics". McGraw Hill. ISBN-13: 978-0-07-319397-7. 
  • Ben S. Bernanke, Robert H. Frank (2007). "Principles of Micro Economics". McGraw Hill. 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


Preceded by
Alan Greenspan
Chairman of the Federal Reserve
2006 – present
Incumbent
Preceded by
John E. Potter
United States order of precedence
as of 2006
Succeeded by
James Connaughton
Preceded by
Harvey S. Rosen
Chairman of the Council of Economic Advisers
2005-2006
Succeeded by
Edward Lazear

 
 

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Who2 Biography. Copyright © 1998-2008 by Who2, LLC. All rights reserved. See the Ben Bernanke biography from Who2.  Read more
Investment Dictionary. Copyright ©2000, Investopedia.com - Owned and Operated by Investopedia Inc. All rights reserved.  Read more
Columbia Encyclopedia. The Columbia Electronic Encyclopedia, Sixth Edition Copyright © 2003, Columbia University Press. Licensed from Columbia University Press. All rights reserved. www.cc.columbia.edu/cu/cup/  Read more
Wikipedia. This article is licensed under the GNU Free Documentation License. It uses material from the Wikipedia article "Ben Bernanke" Read more

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