Ben Bernanke Is Time's 2009 Person of the Year

Time magazine has named Ben Bernanke its 2009 Person of the Year. The magazine said the Federal Reserve chairman's foresight and success at preventing a second Great Depression -- the history that wasn't made this year -- drove its choice.

"We've rarely had such a perfect revision of the cliché that those who do not learn from history are doomed to repeat it," Richard Stengel, Time's managing editor, writes in an introduction to this week's issue. "Bernanke didn't just learn from history; he wrote it himself and was damned if he was going to repeat it. Bernanke decided to do the opposite of what the Fed did back in the '30s: he would loosen the money supply as far as it would go, he would save as many banks as he could, and he wasn't going to hector the American public about pulling up their socks."

Time said that runners-up included House Speaker Nancy Pelosi, Gen. Stanley McChrystal, and Jamaican sprinter Usain Bolt, who each received shorter profiles in the Person of the Year issue.

Bernanke, 56, grew up in South Carolina, the son of a pharmacist and a public school teacher. He always had a way with letters and figures, winning spelling bees and teaching himself calculus. After teaching business and economics at Stanford and New York University, he moved on to Princeton. A shy and professorial sort, his political experience was limited to being a school board member before George W. Bush brought him to Washington in 2002 to serve on the Fed's board. He succeeded Alan Greenspan as chairman in 2006. In that role, Bernanke had hoped to return the Fed to dull obscurity after Greenspan had drawn -- some would say courted -- the media spotlight. Bernanke is a "nerd," Time says, but he ended up being "the most powerful nerd in the world."

His placement at the Federal Reserve was so fortuitous, Time says, that it now looks like his entire life was spent preparing for the unintentionally dramatic role he would play there. Bernanke had been Princeton's leading scholar on the Great Depression and became convinced that that collapse could have been prevented with the right intervention.

In some quarters, however, his determination to take those steps this time around earned him pejorative nicknames like "Bailout Ben." A bill pending in the Senate would curb Bernanke's autonomy at the Fed; a similar measure spearheaded by Rep. Ron Paul and calling for audits of the Federal Reserve, has already passed the House as part of its overhaul of financial-industry regulations. And Bernanke has yet to be confirmed for a second term as chairman.

But Time asserts that Bernanke's temperament and know-how were exactly right for handling a crisis with such high global stakes, and his decisions will be dissected for decades. "His arguments aren't partisan or ideological; they're methodical, grounded in data and the latest academic literature. When he doesn't know something, he doesn't bluster or bluff."

Ultimately, the magazine says it selected the Fed chairman because of the immense power he still has to shape the global economy: "The decisions he has made, and those he has yet to make, will shape the path of our prosperity, the direction of our politics and our relationship to the world."