ben bernankeone of the three professors awarded this Monday, September 10, with the Nobel Prize in Economics, brings together, along with his extensive teaching experience at numerous universities, a first-rate political background as president of the US Federal Reserve between 2006 and 2014, a period in which he had to deal with the great mortgage crisis.
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Bernanke, born December 13, 1953 in Augusta, Georgia, He graduated with a degree in Economics from Harvard University in 1975. and received his Ph.D. from the Massachusetts Institute of Technology in 1979. He has taught for more than two decades at some of the nation’s top universities, and from 1996 to 2002 he was chairman of the economics department at Princeton University.
He is a member of the Econometric Society and the American Academy of Arts and Sciences and has published many articles on economics, monetary policy and macroeconomics. He is also the author of several schoolbooks and two textbooks. Bernanke was appointed in 2006 as a substitute at the head of the Federal Reserve (FED) -the body that sets the country’s monetary policy- of one of the great presidents of this organization, Alan Greenspan, who remained in his position for 18 years.
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From the presidency of the FED Bernanke defended the role of this body as regulator of the banking system and he had to bring out his entire arsenal to fight against the mortgage crisis that was unleashed with the bankruptcy of Lehman Brothers. Bernanke lowered interest rates to 1 percent in December 2008 and intervened in the market with strong injections of liquidity in coordination with other central banks in Europe and Asia, which did not prevent the deepest depression in the world economy since 1929.
He had to deal with the collapse of the real estate market, with subprime mortgages, and the collapse of large financial institutions. On January 31, 2014, Bernanke left the presidency of the Federal Reserve in the hands of Janet Yellen, who became the first woman to head this institution.
EFE
