[3][4] During his tenure as chairman, Bernanke oversaw the Federal Reserve's response to the 2007–2008 financial crisis, for which he was named the 2009 Time Person of the Year.

[4] Before becoming Federal Reserve chairman, Bernanke was a tenured professor at Princeton University and chaired the Department of Economics there from 1996 to September 2002, when he went on public service leave.

[4] Bernanke was awarded the 2022 Nobel Memorial Prize in Economic Sciences, jointly with Douglas Diamond and Philip H. Dybvig, "for research on banks and financial crises",[5][6] more specifically for his analysis of the Great Depression.

From August 5, 2002, until June 21, 2005, he was a member of the Board of Governors of the Federal Reserve System, proposed the Bernanke doctrine, and first discussed "the Great Moderation"—the theory that traditional business cycles have declined in volatility in recent decades through structural changes that have occurred in the international economy, particularly increases in the economic stability of developing nations, diminishing the influence of macroeconomic (monetary and fiscal) policy.

[10] Bernanke wrote about his time as chairman of the Federal Reserve in his 2015 book, The Courage to Act, in which he revealed that the world's economy came close to collapse in 2007 and 2008.

"[24] Once Bernanke was at Harvard for his freshman year, fellow Dillon native Kenneth Manning took him to Brookline for Rosh Hashanah services.

[31][32] Bernanke entered Harvard College in 1971,[33] where he lived in Winthrop House, as did the future chief executive officer of Goldman Sachs, Lloyd Blankfein, and graduated Phi Beta Kappa with an A.B.

He received a Ph.D. degree in economics from the Massachusetts Institute of Technology in 1979 after completing and defending his dissertation, Long-Term Commitments, Dynamic Optimization, and the Business Cycle.

Bernanke's thesis adviser was the future governor of the Bank of Israel, Stanley Fischer, and his readers included Irwin S. Bernstein, Rüdiger Dornbusch, Robert Solow, and Peter Diamond of MIT and Dale Jorgenson of Harvard.

[35] As a member of the board of governors of the Federal Reserve System on February 20, 2004, Bernanke gave a speech in which he postulated that we are in a new era called the Great Moderation, where modern macroeconomic policy has decreased the volatility of the business cycle to the point that it should no longer be a central issue in economics.

[36] In June 2005, Bernanke was named chairman of President George W. Bush's Council of Economic Advisers and resigned as Fed governor.

The appointment was largely viewed as a test run to ascertain if Bernanke could be Bush's pick to succeed Greenspan as Fed chairman the next year.

[43][44][45][46][47][48] However, Bernanke was confirmed for a second term as chairman on January 28, 2010, by a 70–30 vote of the full Senate,[49] the narrowest margin, at the time, for any occupant of the position.

According to The New York Times, Bernanke "has been attacked for failing to foresee the financial crisis, for bailing out Wall Street, and, most recently, for injecting an additional $600 billion into the banking system to give the slow recovery a boost.

"[53] In a letter to Congress from then-New York State Attorney General Andrew Cuomo dated April 23, 2009, Bernanke was mentioned along with former Treasury Secretary Henry Paulson in allegations of fraud concerning the acquisition of Merrill Lynch by Bank of America.

At the meeting, which allegedly took place on December 21, 2008, Paulson told Lewis that he and the board would be replaced if they invoked the MAC clause and additionally not to reveal the extent of the losses to shareholders.

Republican Senator Jim Bunning of Kentucky said on CNBC that he had seen documents which show that Bernanke overruled recommendations from his staff in bailing out AIG.

Senators from both parties who support Bernanke say his actions averted worse problems and outweighed whatever responsibility this may have created for the 2007–2008 financial crisis.

According to the Wall Street Journal, the false name was evidence in a class-action lawsuit against the government by shareholders of AIG, which had been given a Fed-backed bailout when it was near collapse (see below).

Before Bernanke's work, the dominant monetarist theory of the Great Depression was Milton Friedman's view that it had been largely caused by the Federal Reserve's having reduced the money supply and has on several occasions argued that one of the biggest mistakes made during the period was to raise interest rates too early.

[60] In a speech on Milton Friedman's ninetieth birthday (November 8, 2002), Bernanke said: "Let me end my talk by abusing slightly my status as an official representative of the Federal Reserve.

[63] Anna Schwartz, however, was highly critical of Bernanke and wrote an opinion piece in The New York Times advising Obama against his reappointment as chairman of the Federal Reserve.

For example, Larry Summers, later named Director of the White House's National Economic Council under President Obama, 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.

“We had little information the loan would be effective.”[77] Since February 2014, Bernanke has been employed as a Distinguished Fellow in Residence with the Economic Studies Program at the Brookings Institution.

[78] On April 16, 2015, it was announced publicly that Bernanke will work with Citadel, the $25 billion hedge fund founded by billionaire Kenneth C. Griffin, as a senior adviser.

During a speech delivered on April 7, 2010, he warned that the U.S. must soon develop a "credible" plan to address the pending funding crisis faced by "entitlement programs such as Social Security and Medicare" or "in the longer run we will have neither financial stability nor healthy economic growth.

Bernanke also pointed out that deficit reduction will necessarily consist of either raising taxes, cutting entitlement payments and other government spending, or some combination of both.

Their research suggested that the Great Depression was caused by a variety of factors including credit market stress and a failing gold standard.

With a rising External Finance Premium lenders and borrowers were both inclined to protect their financial health due to stressed credit markets.

In 2009, The Wall Street Journal reported that Bernanke was a victim of identity theft, a spreading crime the Federal Reserve has for years issued warnings about.