Dr. Ben S. Bernanke, the Chairman of the Council of Economic Advisers, and nominee to be Chairman of the Board of Governors of the Federal Reserve System, explains why the "Leave it to Beaver model of economic security is increasingly less viable in today's world," and describes what can be done...

In this interview, Dr. Bernanke recounts the concerns of his early days as chairman of the Federal Reserve in 2006 and the onset of the 2007–09 financial crisis. He then turns to the collapse of Lehman Brothers and AIG and its fallout. He emphasizes how important it is for the public to...

Although the Federal Reserve strongly favors private-sector solutions to private-sector problems, the risk of financial instability in the United States and in much of the rest of the world has implied the need to take extraordinary actions on the part of governments and central banks. The...

The authors show that the interest rate on Federal funds is extremely informative about future movements of real macroeconomic variables. Then they argue that the reason for this forecasting success is that the funds rate sensitively records shocks to the supply of bank reserves; that is, the...

This paper employs monthly, industry-level data in a study of Depression-era labor markets. As in Robert Lucas (1970), the model usedhere assumes that employers can vary total labor input not only by changing the number of workers but also by changing the length of thework week. (This assumption...

Building on earlier work by Barry Eichengreen and Jeffrey Sachs, the authors use data for twenty-two countries to study the role of wage stickiness in propagating the Great Depression. Recent research suggests that monetary shocks, transmitted internationally by the gold standard, were a major...