Ben Bernanke

Ben Bernanke seemed an unlikely figure for a financial firefighter. A reserved scholar who spent decades studying the causes of the Great Depression at Princeton, he was tapped to lead the Federal Reserve in 2006. Just two years later, his theoretical expertise became terrifyingly practical as the global financial system teetered on collapse. Drawing directly from his historical research, Bernanke acted with unprecedented speed and scale. He slashed interest rates to zero, orchestrated the rescue of major financial institutions, and launched novel programs to pump liquidity into frozen credit markets. His most controversial move was quantitative easing—creating money to buy vast amounts of bonds. While critics warned of inflation, his actions are widely credited with preventing a second depression. After leaving the Fed, he continued to shape economic thought, later sharing the Nobel Prize for his research on banks and financial crises, completing the journey from historian of crises to its most pivotal modern actor.