Ben Bernanke

Bernanke scored 1590 out of 1600 on the SAT and was a National Merit Scholar.

Jonas Bernanke was born in Boryslav, Austria-Hungary (today part of Ukraine), on January 23, 1891.

He immigrated to the United States from Przemyśl, Poland, and arrived at Ellis Island, aged 30, on June 30, 1921, with his wife Pauline, aged 25.

On the ship's manifest, Jonas's occupation is listed as "clerk" and Pauline's as "doctor med".

The family moved to Dillon from New York in the 1940s.

Bernanke's mother gave up her job as a schoolteacher when her son was born and worked at the family drugstore.

Ben Bernanke also worked there sometimes.

As a teenager, Bernanke worked construction on a hospital and waited tables at a restaurant at nearby South of the Border, which was a roadside attraction, amusement park, and fireworks retailer near his hometown in Hamer, South Carolina, before leaving for college.

To support himself throughout college, he continued to work during the summers at South of the Border.

Ben Shalom Bernanke (born December 13, 1953) is an American economist who served as the 14th chairman of the Federal Reserve from 2006 to 2014.

After leaving the Federal Reserve, he was appointed a distinguished fellow at the Brookings Institution.

As a teenager in the 1960s, Bernanke helped roll the Torah scrolls in his local synagogue.

Although he keeps his beliefs private, his friend Mark Gertler, chairman of New York University's economics department, says they are "embedded in who he (Bernanke) is."

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

Bernanke was educated at East Elementary, J.V. Martin Junior High, and Dillon High School, where he was class valedictorian and played saxophone in the marching band.

Since Dillon High School did not offer calculus at the time, Bernanke taught it to himself.

He also was a contestant in the 1965 National Spelling Bee.

Bernanke entered Harvard College in 1971, 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. degree, and later with an A.M. in economics summa cum laude in 1975.

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.

Bernanke 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.

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.

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", more specifically for his analysis of the Great Depression.

He chaired that department from 1996 until September 2002, when he went on public service leave.

During his tenure as chairman, Bernanke oversaw the Federal Reserve's response to the late-2000s financial crisis, for which he was named the 2009 Time Person of the Year.

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.

Bernanke then served as chairman of President George W. Bush's Council of Economic Advisers before President Bush nominated him to succeed Alan Greenspan as chairman of the United States Federal Reserve.

His first term began on February 1, 2006.

Bernanke was confirmed for a second term as chairman on January 28, 2010, after being renominated by President Barack Obama, who later referred to him as "the epitome of calm."

His second term ended on January 31, 2014, when he was succeeded by Janet Yellen on February 3, 2014.

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.

Bernanke asserts that it was only the novel efforts of the Fed (cooperating with other US agencies and agencies of other governments) that prevented an economic catastrophe greater than the Great Depression.

Bernanke was born in Augusta, Georgia, and was raised on East Jefferson Street in Dillon, South Carolina.

His father Philip was a pharmacist and part-time theater manager.

His mother Edna was an elementary school teacher.

Bernanke has two younger siblings.

His brother, Seth, is a lawyer in Charlotte, North Carolina.

His sister, Sharon, is a longtime administrator at Berklee College of Music in Boston.

The Bernankes were one of the few Jewish families in Dillon and attended Ohav Shalom, a local synagogue; Bernanke learned Hebrew as a child from his maternal grandfather, Harold Friedman, a professional hazzan (cantor), shochet, and Hebrew teacher.

Bernanke's father and uncle owned and managed a drugstore they purchased from Bernanke's paternal grandfather, Jonas Bernanke.