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
External links
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