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Who Is the Federal Reserve Chairman?

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Who Is The Federal Reserve Chairman?
Ben S. Bernanke is the chairman for the Federal Reserve. Dr. Bernanke was born in December 1953 in Augusta, Georgia, and grew up in Dillon, South Carolina. His father Philip was a pharmacist that managed a theater part-time and his mother Edna was an elementary schoolteacher. Bernanke has a brother and sister and is the eldest. His younger brother, Seth, is a lawyer in Charlotte, North Carolina, and his younger sister, Sharon, is a longtime administrator at Berklee College of Music in Boston. As a teenager, Bernanke worked construction on a new hospital and waited tables at a restaurant at nearby South of the Border, a roadside attraction in his hometown of Dillon, before leaving for college. Bernanke met his wife Anna, a schoolteacher, on a blind date. She was a student at Wellesley College, and he was in graduate school at MIT. The Bernanke’s have two children. He received a B.A. in economics in 1975 from Harvard University, and a Ph.D. in economics in 1979 from the Massachusetts Institute of Technology. Bernanke originally took office as Chairman on February 1, 2006, when he also began a 14-year term as a member of the Board. Before his appointment as Chairman, Dr. Bernanke was Chairman of the President's Council of Economic Advisers, from June 2005 to January 2006. By virtue of the chairmanship, he sits on the Financial Stability Oversight Board that oversees the Troubled Asset Relief Program. He also serves as Chairman of the Federal Open Market Committee, the System's principal monetary policy making body. During Bernanke's first term as Chairman, the Federal Reserve experienced its largest increase of power since its creation in 1913. On August 25, 2009, President Obama announced he would nominate Bernanke to a second term as chairman of the Federal Reserve. When Senate Banking Committee hearings on his nomination began on December 3, 2009, several senators from both parties indicated they would not support a second term. However, Bernanke was confirmed for a second term as Chairman on January 28, 2010, by a 70–30 vote of the full Senate, historically the narrowest margin for any occupant of the position. Bernanke has been subjected to criticism concerning the late-2000s financial crisis. Bernanke has been attacked for failing to foresee the financial crisis, for bailing out Wall Street, and, most recently, for injecting an additional $600 billion into the banking system to give the slow recovery a boost.

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