Ben Bernanke

Ben Bernanke
14th Chairman of the Federal Reserve
Incumbent
Assumed office February 1, 2006
President	George W. Bush Barack Obama
Preceded by	Alan Greenspan
23rd Chair of the Council of Economic Advisors
In office 2005–2006
President	George W. Bush
Preceded by	Harvey S. Rosen
Succeeded by	Edward Lazear
Personal details
Born	(1953-12-13) December 13, 1953 Augusta, Georgia
Nationality	American
Spouse	Anna Bernanke
Alma mater	Harvard University MIT
Profession	Macroeconomist

Ben Shalom Bernanke (Template:Pron-en bər-NANG-kee) (born December 13, 1953) is an American economist, and the current Chairman of the Board of Governors of the United States Federal Reserve. Bernanke succeeded Alan Greenspan on February 1, 2006. He was ranked the 4th most powerful person in the world in an annual ranking by Newsweek in 2008.

Early life

Born in Augusta, Georgia, Bernanke was raised in a ranch house on East Jefferson Street in Template:City-state. His father Philip was a pharmacist and part-time theater manager, and his mother Edna was originally a schoolteacher. He is the eldest of three children, having a brother and sister. His younger brother, Seth, is a lawyer in Charlotte, North Carolina, and his younger sister, Sharon, is a longtime administrator at Berklee College of Music in Boston.

The Bernankes 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 Harold Friedman, who was a professional hazzan and Hebrew teacher. His father and uncle co-owned and managed a drugstore that they bought from his paternal grandfather, Jonas Bernanke. Jonas was born in Boryslav, Austria-Hungary (today part of Ukraine), on January 23, 1891, and immigrated to the United States from Przemyśl, Poland (part of Austria-Hungary until 1919). He arrived at Ellis Island, age 30, Thursday, June 30, 1921, with his wife Pauline, age 25. On the ship’s manifest, Jonas’ occupation is listed as “clerk” and Pauline’s as “doctor med.” They moved to Dillon, South Carolina, from New York in the 1940s. Bernanke’s mother often worked there as well, having given up her job as a school teacher when he was born, and Bernanke also assisted from time to time.

Education

Bernanke was educated at East Elementary, J. V. Martin Junior High, and Dillon High School, where he was class valedictorian. At age 11, Bernanke won the state spelling bee competition but finished 26th overall at the national competition in Washington, tripping up on the word “edelweiss.” Bernanke also taught himself calculus, edited the school newspaper, and achieved a near-perfect SAT score of 1590 out of 1600. He was also an All-State saxophonist, playing in the school’s marching band. Bernanke spent his undergraduate years at Harvard University and graduated with a BA in economics summa cum laude in 1975. He received a PhD in economics from the Massachusetts Institute of Technology in 1979. His thesis was named "Long-term commitments, dynamic optimization, and the business cycle" and his thesis adviser was Stanley Fischer.

Young adult

Bernanke worked construction on a new hospital and waited tables at a restaurant at nearby South of the Border before leaving for college. During the summer, he attended Camp Ramah located in New England. To support himself throughout college, he worked during the summers at South of the Border, a roadside attraction in his hometown of Dillon.

Academic and government career

Bernanke meeting with United States President Barack Obama.

Bernanke 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. Dr. Bernanke served as a member of the Board of Governors of the Federal Reserve System from 2002 to 2005, and was Chairman of the President's Council of Economic Advisers, from June 2005 to January 2006. On February 1, 2006, he was appointed as a member of the Board for a fourteen-year term and to a four-year term as Chairman.

In one of his first speeches, entitled “Deflation: Making Sure It Doesn’t Happen Here,” he outlined what has been referred to as the Bernanke Doctrine.

In view of his current position as Fed chair, Bernanke also sits on the newly established Financial Stability Oversight Board that oversees the Troubled Assets Relief Program

Bernanke’s future as Federal Reserve chairman became uncertain on November 21, 2008, when it was announced that President-elect Barack Obama would name Tim Geithner as Treasury Secretary over Larry Summers, leading to speculation that Obama was positioning Summers as Bernanke's successor. Summers was picked to run the National Economic Council. Two Obama advisers said that Summers would be the leading candidate to become the next Federal Reserve chairman should President Obama choose not to reappoint Bernanke when his term ends January 31, 2010. Whitehouse sources announced on 24 August that President Obama would nominate Bernanke for another term in 2010.

Economic views

With his predecessor, Alan Greenspan, looking on, Chairman Ben Bernanke addresses President George W. Bush and others after being sworn in to the Federal Reserve post. Also on stage with the President are Mrs. Anna Bernanke and Roger W. Ferguson, Jr., Vice Chairman of the Federal Reserve.

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. He is among the 50 most published economists in the world according to IDEAS/RePEc.

Bernanke is particularly interested in the economic and political causes of the Great Depression, on which he has written extensively. Before Bernanke's work the dominant monetarist theory of the Great Depression was Milton Friedman's view that it had been largely caused by the Federal Reserve reducing the money supply and in a speech on Milton Friedman's 90th birthday on November 8, 2002 said "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." Bernanke focused less on the role of the federal reserve, and more on the role of private banks and financial institutions. Bernanke found that the financial disruptions of 1930-33 reduced the efficiency of the credit allocation process; and that the resulting higher cost and reduced availability of credit acted to depress aggregate demand, identifying an effect he called the financial accelerator. When faced with a mild downturn, banks are likely to significantly cut back lending and other risky ventures. This further hurts the economy, creating a vicious cycle and potentially turning a mild recession into a major depression. Economist Brad DeLong, who had previously advocated his own theory for the Great Depression, notes that the current financial crisis has increased the pertinence of Bernanke's theory.

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." 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 rhetorical economic libertarianism of Greenspan.

In 2005 Bernanke coined the term saving glut, the idea that a worldwide oversupply of savings finances the current account deficits of the United States and keeps interest rates low.

His first months as chairman of the Federal Reserve System were marked by difficulties communicating with the media. An advocate of more transparent Fed policy and clearer statements than Greenspan had made, he had to back away from his initial idea of stating clearer inflation goals as such statements tended to affect the stock market. Maria Bartiromo disclosed on CNBC their private conversation on Fed policy (in which Bernanke said investors had misinterpreted his comments as indicating that he was "dovish" on inflation), and he was criticized for making public statements about Fed direction.

Presidential candidate and Texas representative Ron Paul, a member of the House Banking Committee — who takes the view that the Federal Reserve System should be abolished and the economy should revert to 'Hard Assets' — has criticized Bernanke for "continually lowering interest rates," which he avers to have caused drastic inflation and unnecessary growth of the money supply, leading to what Paul refers to as the "inflation tax." However, many "professional economists" argued that failure to have lowered the Fed's target rate would have contributed far more significantly to recession, and urged Bernanke (and the rest of the Federal Open Market Committee) to lower the rate beyond what it had done. For example, Larry Summers, the Charles Eliot Norton Professor of Economics at Harvard and former Treasury Secretary, wrote in the Financial Times on November 26, 2007 — in a column in which he argued that recession was likely — that "....maintaining demand must be the over-arching macro-economic priority. That means the Federal Reserve System has to get ahead of the curve and recognize — as the market already has — that levels of the Federal Funds rate that were neutral when the financial system was working normally are quite contractionary today."

David Leonhardt of The New York Times wrote, on January 30, 2008, that "Dr. Bernanke's forecasts have been too sunny over the last six months. [On] the other hand, his forecast was a lot better than Wall Street's in mid-2006. Back then, he resisted calls for further interest rate increases because he thought the economy might be weakening. He was dead-on right about that—and the situation would be even worse now if he had listened to his critics then."

Merrill Lynch merger with Bank of America

In a letter to Congress from New York Attorney General Andrew Cuomo dated April 23, 2009, Bernanke was mentioned along with former Treasury Secretary Henry Paulson in allegations of fraud concerning the acquisition of Merrill Lynch by Bank of America. The letter alleged that the extent of the losses at Merrill Lynch were not disclosed to Bank of America by Bernanke and Paulson. When Bank of America CEO Kenneth Lewis informed Paulson that Bank of America was exiting the merger by invoking the "Materially Adverse Change" clause Paulson immediately called Lewis to a meeting in Washington. At the meeting, which allegedly took place on December 21, 2008, Paulson told Lewis that he and the board would be replaced if they invoked the MAC clause and additionally not to reveal the extent of the losses to shareholders. Paulson stated to Cuomo's office that he was directed by Bernanke to threaten Lewis in this manner. Congressional hearings into these allegations were conducted on June 25, 2009, with Bernanke testifying that he did not bully Ken Lewis. Under intense questioning by members of Congress, Bernanke said, "I never said anything about firing the board and the management [of Bank of America]." In further testimony, Bernanke said the Fed did nothing illegal or unethical in its efforts to convince Bank of America not to end the merger. Lewis told the panel that authorities expressed "strong views" but said he would not characterize their stance as improper .

Awards and fellowships

• Fellow, Econometric Society (1997)
• Distinguished Leadership in Government Award, Columbia Business School (2008)

Bibliography

• Ben S. Bernanke (1983). "Nonmonetary effects of the financial crisis in the propagation of the Great Depression". American Economic Review. 73 (3): 257–276.
• Ben Bernanke, Alan Blinder (1992). "The federal funds rate and the channels of monetary transmission". American Economic Review. 82 (4): 901–921.
• Andrew B. Abel, Ben S. Bernanke (2001). Macroeconomics. Addison Wesley. ISBN 0-201-44133-0.
• Ben Bernanke (2005). Essays on the Great Depression. Princeton University Press. ISBN 0-691-11820-5.
• Ben Bernanke, Thomas Laubach, Frederic Mishkin, Adam Posen (2005). Inflation Targeting: Lessons from the International Experience. Princeton University Press. ISBN 0-691-08689-3.{{cite book}}: CS1 maint: multiple names: authors list (link)
• Ben S. Bernanke, Robert H. Frank (2007). Principles of Macro Economics. McGraw Hill. ISBN 978-0-07-319397-7.
• Andrew B. Abel, Ben S. Bernanke (2005). Macroeconomics. Pearson/Addison Wesley. ISBN 0-32-116212-9.

See also

• "Greenspan put"
• Every Breath Bernanke Takes

References

• Andrews, Edmund L. (Nov. 5, 2005). "All for a more open Fed". New Straits Times, p. 21.
• Lowenstein, Roger (Jan. 20, 2008). "The Education of Ben Bernanke." New York Times Magazine,

External links

• "A Crash Course for Central Bankers" by Ben Bernanke in Foreign Policy
• Ben Bernanke Parody Blog
• "Downside Danger" by Ben Bernanke in Foreign Policy
• Bernanke's "printing press" speech
• Address by Bernanke titled "Skills, Ownership, and Economic Security" with summary, video, and transcript.
• At the Fed, an Unknown Became a Safe Choice - The New York Times
• Bernanke Papers and Sources
• IDEAS/RePEc