Ben Bernanke Theme Park Waiter
On Friday, March 14, 2008 paralyzed investors, traders, and independent sovereign states of the interconnected global financial community stood by helplessly as the venerable Bear Stearns investment bank disintegrated towards absolute collapse. The horror not only threatened to destroy this 85-year old institution - but every pathetic shard of remaining goodwill available to our Western brand of free market capitalism.
Ben Bernanke was built for this.
Ben Bernanke, Prodigy
Ben Shalom Bernanke, born December 13, 1953 at Augusta, GA and raised in Dillon, SC, was quietly acknowledged as a child prodigy during his grade school years. Young Bernanke won the South Carolina state spelling bee, edited the school newspaper, and taught calculus to his own self. The Dillon High School class valedictorian also scored a 1590 out of 1600 SAT score before being summoned to Harvard University.
Although apparently destined for Greatness - the maturing Ben Bernanke certainly developed an appreciation for the Main Street outsider to Wall Street as a young scholar. The grandson of a Jewish immigrant from the old line Austria-Hungary empire spent hours holding court at the family pharmacy and actually held down a part time job at Dillon's infamously tacky South of the Border theme park abutting Interstate 95 during his summers away from Cambridge to help pay for school. Interestingly, his ultimate decision to attend Harvard arrived with much trepidation.
The Bernanke family fretted over the fact that the enrollee lacked the proper clothes to fit in with his Northern compatriots.
Ben Bernanke, Academic
Still, the Golden Boy academic graduated from Harvard with a 1975 economics BA and was defending his "Long-term commitments, dynamic optimization, and the business cycle" PhD thesis at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology, four short years thereafter. Bernanke was to then teach at the Stanford Graduate School of Business before returning East.
Dr. Bernanke was a tenured professor at Princeton University by the age of 31 and chaired the department from 1996-2002. Certainly, the rising gentleman honed his leadership skills at this institution - serving as the perfect epoxy glue holding together the disparate views of a Department so contentious that two rival Professors refused to even acknowledge each other's presence.
The Chairman left Princeton in 2002 on public service leave.
Washington Called.
Ben Bernanke's Economic Principles
Republican Party leadership began to embrace Bernanke through his prolific writings, teachings, and extensive speeches on the lecture tour. The economist was designated to serve as a member of the Board of Governors within the Federal Reserve System in 2002.
President George W. Bush introduced the academic as the head of the Council of Economic Advisers, three years thereafter. This fiscal lieutenant to the President often serves as the primary incubator for the Chairman of the Federal Reserve Board of Governors pinnacle of power.
The freshly minted economic adjunct to Washington had already written several articles, books, and even two detailed macroeconomic textbooks. Dr. Bernanke is listed as one of the 50 most published economists in the world and has held the prestigious Guggenheim Fellowship awarded to leading scholars. Bernanke's subject matter of choice?
The Great Depression.
Ben Bernanke's research identifies the collapse of the banking system as the key mechanism driving the 1929 recession to spiral out of control into a 1930's Great Depression. Whereas Chicago School economist Milton Friedman intimated that the U.S. Government and its relatively new 1913 Federal Reserve Bank were to blame for standing pat amidst the systemic risks of outright bank failure, Bernanke expands upon this sentiment by presenting his hypothesis that outright panic fostered by the lack of available credit promulgated the abject misery.
source: yahoo