Ben Bernanke (b. 1953)
Who They Were
Ben Bernanke (b. 1953) is an American economist who chaired the Federal Reserve from 2006 to 2014 and later shared the economics Nobel. A scholar of the Great Depression before entering policy, he brought that academic study of banking panics directly to bear when the global financial crisis struck in 2007-2008. He succeeded Alan Greenspan, whose long period of low interest rates in the early 2000s is often cited as a contributing factor to the housing bubble. Under his chairmanship the Fed led an aggressive and unconventional response to the crisis, cutting its policy rate to near zero and launching large-scale asset purchases. He had previously taught at Princeton and chaired the Council of Economic Advisers before joining the Fed's Board of Governors.
Key Contributions
Bernanke is best known for steering U.S. monetary policy through the 2008 financial crisis and for pioneering the tools that defined the response.
- Quantitative easing (QE): large-scale purchases of government and mortgage-backed securities intended to lower long-term rates and support the economy once short-term rates reached the effective lower bound.
- Emergency lending and coordinated action to stabilise the banking system during the crisis.
- Drawing on his academic work on the Great Depression to argue for aggressive intervention to prevent a repeat of the 1930s.
In 2022 he shared the Sveriges Riksbank Prize in Economic Sciences with Douglas Diamond and Philip Dybvig for research on banks and financial crises, work explaining why banks are vulnerable to runs and why their failures deepen downturns.
On EconRecall
Federal Reserve Chair from 2006 to 2014 who led the response to the 2008 crisis and later shared the 2022 economics Nobel. Play the games that feature Ben Bernanke: