KEYNOTE SPEAKER
Former Chair of the Federal Reserve | Nobel Laureate in Economics
The man who steered the Federal Reserve — and the world economy — through the worst financial crisis since the Great Depression, then won the Nobel Prize for the research that prepared him for it. Bernanke turns the view from inside the crisis room into clarity on the forces still shaping markets today.
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WHY BEN
The man who steered the Federal Reserve — and the world economy — through the worst financial crisis since the Great Depression, then won the Nobel Prize for the research that prepared him for it. Bernanke turns the view from inside the crisis room into clarity on the forces still shaping markets today.
KEYNOTE TOPICS
The definitive first-hand account of the 2008 collapse from the person who held the line, distilling what nearly broke the global economy into lessons leaders can still act on. Bernanke shows how panics turn from abstractions into catastrophes for the real economy — and what it takes to stop them.
Where interest rates, inflation, and central bank policy are heading, from the person who rewrote the modern monetary playbook. Bernanke reads the global economy for what it means to the decisions businesses and investors face next.
How the tools he pioneered — quantitative easing, forward guidance, inflation targeting — reshaped the relationship between central banks, markets, and the public. A clear-eyed look at the powers and limits of the institutions that underwrite the world's financial stability.
A practical framework for understanding the forces that move markets and the economy, drawn from the person who managed them under the highest possible stakes. Bernanke helps audiences separate signal from noise in a volatile economic environment.
Dr. Ben Bernanke served as Chair of the Board of Governors of the Federal Reserve from 2006 to 2014, leading the United States and the world through the most severe financial crisis since the Great Depression. Appointed by Presidents Bush and Obama, he guided the Fed's response to the 2007–2008 crisis and the Great Recession, introducing unprecedented tools — quantitative easing, forward guidance, and a formal inflation target — while transforming how the central bank communicates with markets and the public. In 2022, he was awarded the Nobel Memorial Prize in Economic Sciences for his research into banks and financial crises.
An economist of rare distinction, Bernanke graduated summa cum laude from Harvard and earned his PhD at MIT, where his dissertation on the Great Depression laid the intellectual foundation for the very crisis he would later confront in office. He spent nearly two decades as a professor at Princeton, chairing its economics department, before entering public service. Today a Distinguished Fellow at the Brookings Institution, he is the author of the bestselling memoir The Courage to Act and, most recently, 21st Century Monetary Policy.
Few people in modern history have had to apply their life's research in real time, under the highest possible stakes. Bernanke spent his academic career studying how the Federal Reserve's failures deepened the Great Depression — and then, as Fed Chair, found himself with the authority to ensure those mistakes were not repeated. His central insight, drawn from both the archive and the crisis room, is that financial panics are not abstractions but catastrophes for the real economy, and that decisive, imaginative central banking can be the difference between a recession and a depression. For audiences, he offers something no commentator can: the perspective of the person who held the line.
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