Le président de la Réserve fédérale Ben Bernanke est la personnalité de l'année, selon Time, pour la manière dont il a géré la pire crise financière depuis la Grande dépression des années 1930. Il a devancé Barack Obama, couronné l'année dernière, Nancy Pelosi, présidente de la Chambre des représentants, et Steve Jobs, pdg d'Apple, entre autres finalistes. Je cite dans le texte un extrait des raisons invoquées par l'hebdomadaire :
Professor Bernanke of Princeton was a leading scholar of the Great Depression. He knew how the passive Fed of the 1930s helped create the calamity - through its stubborn refusal to expand the money supply and its tragic lack of imagination and experimentation. Chairman Bernanke of Washington was determined not to be the Fed chairman who presided over Depression 2.0. So when turbulence in U.S. housing markets metastasized into the worst global financial crisis in more than 75 years, he conjured up trillions of new dollars and blasted them into the economy; engineered massive public rescues of failing private companies; ratcheted down interest rates to zero; lent to mutual funds, hedge funds, foreign banks, investment banks, manufacturers, insurers and other borrowers who had never dreamed of receiving Fed cash; jump-started stalled credit markets in everything from car loans to corporate paper; revolutionized housing finance with a breathtaking shopping spree for mortgage bonds; blew up the Fed's balance sheet to three times its previous size; and generally transformed the staid arena of central banking into a stage for desperate improvisation. He didn't just reshape U.S. monetary policy; he led an effort to save the world economy.