Federal Reserve Chairman Ben Bernanke

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Biography - Ben Bernanke

Ben S. Bernanke was born in 1953 in Augusta, Georgia and grew up in South Carolina. He earned a Bachelor of Arts in Economics from Harvard and then completed a Ph.D. in Economics at MIT in 1979. Shortly afterwards, he accepted a teaching position at Stanford University’s Graduate School of Business.


In 1996, Bernanke became the Chairman of Princeton University’s economics department, a role he fulfilled until joining the Federal Reserve Board of Governors on a full-time basis in 2002. While a member of the Board of Governors, Bernanke also served on President Bush’s Council of Economic Advisors where he provided advice to the President and assisted with the preparation of the Economic Report.[1]


Bernanke has published a wide range of articles on monetary topics but is especially interested in the Great Depression of the 1930s and the role – that he feels – the Federal Reserve played in making a bad situation worse. In a speech at the H. Parker Willis Lecture in Economic Policy at Washington and Lee University in Lexington, Virginia on March 2, 2004, Bernanke stated that the most important lesson of the Great Depression was that “price stability should be a key objective of monetary policy. By allowing persistent declines in the money supply and in the price level, the Federal Reserve of the late 1920s and 1930s greatly destabilized the U.S. economy”.[2]


Related Links:

United States Federal Reserve
Commentary - Ben Bernanke


References

  1. Federal Reserve website
  2. Speech to the H. Parker Willis Lecture in Economic Policy, Washington and Lee University, March 2, 2002
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