This Day In Market History: Ben Bernanke Is Born

Each day, Benzinga will take a look back at a notable market-related moment that happened on this date.

What Happened? On this day in 1953, farmer Federal Reserve chair Ben Bernanke was born.

Where Was The Market? The Dow Jones Industrial Average traded at 279.91. The S&P 500 did not yet exist.

What Else Was Going On In The World? In 1953, the Korean War ended. The Soviet Union tested its version of a hydrogen bomb. The average cost of a new house was $9,550.

Bernanke Birth: Bernanke was born in South Carolina to a schoolteacher mother and a pharmacist father. After gaining an undergraduate degree from Harvard and a graduate degree from MIT, Bernanke began his career teaching economics at Stanford and Princeton University. He later served as a member of the Federal Reserve’s Board of Governors from 2002 to 2005.

Bernanke was first nominated for the position of Federal Reserve chairman by President George W. Bush in 2005.

During his first term at the position, Bernanke was a central player in the U.S. monetary policy response to the 2008 financial crisis. Bernanke spearheaded an extremely aggressive and untested approach to combating the crisis, which included cutting the fed funds interest rate to near zero and launching an unconventional quantitative easing program that included Fed purchases of Treasury bond securities and mortgage-backed securities to increase the economy’s money supply.

Bernanke’s policies faced plenty of criticism at the time, but they ultimately served to help stabilize the economy and avoid a collapse of the financial system.

In 2010, President Barack Obama nominated Bernanke for a second term at the position. Bernanke was succeeded by Janet Yellen in 2014.