"Bernanke is being an academic!" When pugnacious US TV pundit Jim Cramer was screaming about the Fed's inaction in August 2007 as markets went into meltdown, the Fed chairman's donnish demeanour was widely seen as a handicap, by contrast with Alan Greenspan's Wall Street savvy.
Yet as the crisis wore on, it was precisely Bernanke's reputation as the pre-eminent scholar of the Great Depression that convinced most investors – and President Obama – that he remained the right man for the job.
Born in the southern city of Augusta, Georgia, in 1953, and raised in the city of Dillon, South Carolina, Bernanke was a school swot, winning the state spelling bee at the age of 11, and teaching himself calculus. This precociousness propelled him straight from the Deep South to the Ivy League: he took a degree in economics at Harvard, followed by a PhD from MIT in Boston, and went on to hold teaching posts at Stanford, California, and NYU and MIT on the east coast, before settling at Princeton in the mid-1980s.
There he remained, building up an impressive record of economic publications – and serving as a governor of the New York Fed in his spare time – until George W Bush plucked him from this ivory tower for an eight-month stint as chairman of his Council of Economic Advisers, where his penchant for wearing light-coloured socks with dark suits apparently caused hilarity in the White House.
Bernanke has written a series of weighty economic tomes, including one of the standard textbooks used by students — Principles of Macroeconomics, with fellow professor Robert Frank.
But his best-known contribution to economic scholarship was in understanding the failures made by American policymakers that turned the Wall Street crash of 1929 into the devastating slump of the 1930s. His book, Essays on the Great Depression, has shot from being a work of economic history to a well-thumbed guide to his thinking over the past 12 months, as the financial system hovered on the brink of outright collapse and the world economy lurched into recession.
Bernanke's style, as well as his scholarly background, differs radically from Greenspan's. Since taking on the job, he has deliberately eschewed the gnomic utterances of the "maestro," and adopted a more straightforward approach to communicating with Congress and the public – including making clear to ordinary Americans how close to the brink they came.
As he told an audience in Kansas City last month: "I was not going to be the Federal Reserve chairman who presided over the second Great Depression."
