FINANCE: Bernanke says crisis has 'dominated my waking hours'

Thuesday, 26 Abril 2009 - Federal Reserve Chairman Ben Bernanke said last week that battling the worst financial crisis to hit the United States since the 1930s has "dominated my waking hours" for the last 21 months.

In remarks to graduates of Boston College School of Law in Newton, Mass., the Fed chief offered some rare personal and candid thoughts about dealing with challenges at work and at home.

Bernanke's advice to graduates: be prepared; stay optimistic, be flexible ---- even adventurous.

A student of the Great Depression who spent much of his professional career as an economics professor, Bernanke said it was a series of unpredictable factors that shaped his future.

At Harvard University, he chose to major in economics as a compromise between math and English.

In graduate school at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology, he became interested in monetary and financial history when a professor gave him several books on the subject. Bernanke then became determined to learn more about the causes of financial crises and their impact on the economy.

"Little did I realize then how relevant that subject would become one day," he said.

And on a more personal level: it was on a blind date that he met his wife, Anna.

Bernanke, who took over the Fed in February 2006, also spoke of the challenges of trying to predict the economy's behavior.

"In some ways, predicting the economy is even more difficult than forecasting the weather because an economy is not made up of molecules whose behavior is subject to the laws of physics, but rather of human beings who are themselves thinking about the future and whose behavior may be influenced by the forecasts that they or others make," he said.

He urged the graduates to take lessons from both life's opportunities and obstacles, and not to fear the unknown.

"We all have moments we will never forget," said Bernanke, who grew up in a small town in South Carolina and attended public schools there.

One of those moments for him occurred when he entered Harvard Yard for the first time as a 17-year-old freshman. Bernanke recalled looking around at the ivy-covered brick buildings and hearing music blasting out of dorm windows and wondered: "What have I done?"

It was part of the journey that would take him to the country's top economic office, where he would court both praise and controversy for his bold and unconventional approach to combating the financial crisis. Of course, he didn't know that then.

"All I knew was that I had chosen to abandon the known and the comfortable for the unknown and the challenging," he said.

Source -  http://www.nctimes.com/articles/2009/05/25/business/z6fde2058d38b6f8e882575be00763264.txt