Congrats, Ben!

Ben Bernanke is now the second Nobel-prize winner who taught me during my first year as a PhD student in Econ at Stanford. The first was the late Kenneth Arrow. Bernanke is not in the same league as Arrow in terms of his contributions to the discipline, but really almost nobody is. Bernanke is a very smart guy who wrote some really important papers in macroeconomics based on his careful studies of the Great Depression. Some people think the wisdom he gained from those studies prepared him to take actions that prevented a second Great Depression during the 2008 financial crisis. I incline toward that view myself. Sure, he may have been too friendly toward the banksters, but who is the counterfactual Fed Chair who does it better? He was also, in my experience, an excellent teacher– one of the best I had in the program.