Ben Bernanke

Origins and early life

Ben Shalom Bernanke was born in Augusta, Georgia, on 13 December 1953 and grew up in Dillon, South Carolina, where his grandfather Jonas had opened Jay Bee Drugs in 1941 and where his father and uncle later ran the pharmacy. All four of his grandparents were Jewish immigrants from eastern Europe, his mother's father a kosher butcher and Hebrew teacher, and the family attended Dillon's small synagogue, Ohav Shalom. A friend from Dillon, Kenneth Manning, then a Harvard student, persuaded his parents to let him apply there; he entered Harvard in 1971, graduated summa cum laude in 1975 and took his doctorate at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology in 1979.

Work and career

After six years at Stanford he moved to Princeton in 1985 and chaired its economics department from 1995 to 2002. His 1983 paper on the Great Depression argued that bank runs and defaults had broken down the flow of credit, and that this collapse, alongside the monetary forces stressed by Milton Friedman and Anna Schwartz, made the slump so deep and so long. Appointed to the Federal Reserve Board in 2002, he chaired the Council of Economic Advisers in 2005 and was chairman of the Federal Reserve for two terms, from February 2006 to January 2014.

During the crisis of 2008 and 2009 he worked to prevent a collapse of the financial system, then used large-scale asset purchases, a formal inflation target and regular press conferences by the chair. Since 2014 he has been a distinguished senior fellow at the Brookings Institution in Washington, and in 2019 he served as president of the American Economic Association.

Recognition

In 2022 he shared the Nobel Memorial Prize in Economic Sciences with Douglas Diamond and Philip Dybvig, “for research on banks and financial crises”, the Royal Swedish Academy of Sciences citing his finding that bank runs were a decisive factor in making the Great Depression so deep and prolonged.