Ben S. Bernanke

Ben S. Bernanke combines academic economics with experience at the center of American monetary policy. Courage to Act: A Memoir of a Crisis and Its Aftermath recounts his years as chair of the Federal Reserve, focusing on the housing collapse, the global financial crisis, and the policy tools used to stabilize markets and support recovery. W. W. Norton published the memoir in 2015 and later issued a paperback with a new afterword. Bernanke served as Federal Reserve chair from 2006 to 2014 and is now a distinguished fellow at the Brookings Institution. He shared the 2022 Nobel Memorial Prize in Economic Sciences for research on banks and financial crises, a scholarly background that gives the memoir both personal and institutional perspective.