Ben Bernanke
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Ben Shalom Bernanke[1] 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 lifeBernanke was born December 13, 1953 in Augusta, Georgia and grew up in Dillon, South Carolina as the eldest of three children, with a younger brother and sister. His younger brother, David Bernanke, is currently the Chair of Anatomy at the Medical University of South Carolina. 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] CareerOn leaving high school in 1972 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. He is among the 50 best 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. On Milton Friedman's ninetieth birthday, November 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.[10] 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."[11] 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 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.[12] 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.[13] Presidential Candidate and Texas Representative Ron Paul, a member of the House Banking Committee - who takes the view that the Fed should be abolished and the economy should revert to 'Hard Assets'[14] - has criticized Bernanke for "continually lowering interest rates," which he avers to have caused drastic inflation and growth of the money supply, leading to what Paul refers to as the "inflation tax."[15] 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, Lawrence H. 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 Fed 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." [16] David Leonhardt of the New York Times wrote, on January 30, 2008, that "Mr. 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." [17] Bernanke has since made several interest rate cuts in an effort to stabilize a shaky U.S. economy. On Wednesday, February 27th, 2008, Bernanke announced the Federal Reserve has plans to cut interest rates yet again. Awards and fellowships
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