Ben Shalom Bernanke, American macroeconomist, is the Chairman of the Board of Governors of the United States Federal Reserve. He was previously Chairman of the U.S. President's Council of Economic Advisers (CEA), and member of the Board of Governors of the Federal Reserve, serving from August 2002 until just prior to his June 2005 swearing-in as CEA chairman. Bernanke was previously the chairman of the Department of Economics at Princeton University. On October 24, 2005, President George W. Bush nominated Bernanke to succeed Alan Greenspan as Chairman of the Federal Reserve. Bernanke was sworn in on February 1, 2006.

He graduated from high school in Dillon, South Carolina in 1971; from Harvard University in 1975; and earned his Ph.D. at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology in 1979. He taught at Stanford University from 1979 until 1985, and has since then been a professor in the Department of Economics at Princeton University. He has chaired that department since 1996. He has given several important lectures at the London School of Economics on monetary theory and policy and written three textbooks on macroeconomics.

Bernanke was the Director of the Monetary Economics Program of the National Bureau of Economic Research and the editor of the American Economic Review. He is known for his work on the transmission channels of monetary policy, particularly a 1992 paper with Alan Blinder arguing that expansion of credit was more important than the money supply. His work on the transmission of monetary policy also gave rise to an interest in the causes of the Great Depression.