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Bernanke: Depression scholar who faced global financial crisis
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'Creative leadership’: Ben Bernanke (pictured) and the economists Douglas Diamond and Philip Dybvig are awarded for research on banks and “how society deals with financial crises”. (AFP/Getty Images/Chip Somodevilla)
Track record and achievements of Ben Bernanke, one of the three Nobel Economic Prize winners.
Ben Bernanke, who shared the Nobel Economics Prize on Monday, is a scholar of the Great Depression who helped to steer the United States through another major financial crisis as Federal Reserve chief.
Bernanke took over as Fed chair in February 2006, just before the collapse of the US housing market that triggered a global crisis of epic proportions.
Many analysts say Bernanke's aggressive and unorthodox moves allowed the central bank to prop up the financial system and keep credit flowing, therefore avoiding a repeat of a 1930s-style calamity.
His critics, though, argue that he did little to avert the crisis and may have helped fuel the problems when he was a Fed governor in 2002-2005 under then-chairman Alan Greenspan and subsequently headed the Council of Economic Advisers under former president George W. Bush.
The Nobel jury awarded the prize to Bernanke, 68, along with fellow US economists Douglas Diamond and Philip Dybvig for having "significantly improved our understanding of the role of banks in the economy, particularly during financial crises, as well as how to regulate financial markets."
Bernanke was singled out for his analysis of "the worst economic crisis in modern history"—the Great Depression in the 1930s. He published a book on his essays about the topic and coauthored another about the 2008 financial crisis.
