Ben S. Bernanke

http://www.federalreserve.gov/Ben S. Bernanke is the current Federal Reserve Chairman. He was nominated by President George W. Bush in October 2005 to succeed Alan Greenspan. He was sworn in as chairman on February 1, 2006.

Bernanke was born in Georgia and grew up in South Carolina. He graduated from Harvard in 1975 with a BA in economics and received a PhD in economics from the Massachusetts Institute of Technology (MIT) in 1979. He taught at the Stanford Graduate Scholl of Business from 1979 to 1985 and became a tenured professor at Princeton University.

Before becoming Federal Reserve Chairman, he was the Director of the Monetary Economics Program of the National Bureau of Economic Research and editor of the American Economic Review. In addition, he was chairman of the US President's Council of Economic Advisors (CEA).

Bernanke has been an advocate of a more transparent and democratic Federal Reserve, a different approach than Alan Greenspan. However, Bernanke's first months as FED Chairman were rocky. He took over in the midst of the sub-prime mortgage crisis and the housing bubble. Also, he was criticized by some as being too "academic" and out of touch with the markets.

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