Economic Letter

Ben Bernanke’s contributions to economic thinking have been vast, from his extensive study of the Great Depression to groundbreaking research on the interplay of finance and the macroeconomy and the usefulness of unconventional monetary policy tools. His research helped guide his tenure as Federal Reserve Chair and his role in putting the U.S. economy on a path to the longest expansion in its history. Through that role, he also built a better and more transparent Fed for the future. The following remarks are adapted from a presentation by the Federal Reserve Bank of San Francisco president, who joined Christina Romer (University of California-Berkeley), Mark Gertler (New York University), Emi Nakamura (University of California-Berkeley), and Peter Rousseau (Vanderbilt University) to discuss Bernanke’s legacy at the American Economic Association Annual Meeting in San Francisco on January 5.