Former Federal Reserve Chairman Ben S. Bernanke, Douglas W. Diamond and Philip H. Dybvig are the 2022 Nobel Prize laureates in economics. The Swedish Academy of Sciences awards three researchers “for research on banks and financial crises.
The most famous of the three laureates is Ben Bernanke, who was the president of the US central bank for two terms between 2006 and 2014. First, he was appointed by George W. Bush. Later in 2009, Barack Obama steered the country’s monetary policy in the midst of the Great Financial Crisis that began in 2008.
He did his job as a “recognized expert on the crisis of the 1930s” and made the historic decision to lower interest rates to 0% to improve financing conditions and help the economy recover from the crisis. A path that was later followed by the European Central Bank (ECB) and the rest of the central banks of the Western world.
The Swedish Academy emphasizes that both Bernanke, Douglas Diamond and Philip Dybvig “significantly improved our understanding of the role of banks in the economy, especially during the financial crisis”. “An important finding of their research is why it is vital to avoid bank collapses,” he continues, implying that these economists defend the central role of banks in economic activity while acknowledging their vulnerability. and the need for sovereigns to be extreme lenders to reduce the risk of deep financial crises.
“The foundations of this research were laid by Ben Bernanke, Douglas Diamond and Philip Dybwig in the early 1980s,” says the Nobel Prize Committee in Economics.
History of the award
The prize was established in 1968, 300 years after the birth of the central bank of Sweden, which sponsors it. Since then, every year the candidate request form is sent to dozens of economics departments in universities around the world.
From these proposals, which may exceed 100 researchers, the Nobel Committee makes a selection of these recommendations, and from this final screening, the plenary of the Swedish Academy of Sciences selects the winner by secret ballot.
This category was not among the five that Alfred Nobel left in his will: physics, chemistry, literature, medicine and peace. But over the years it has been considered another. The total prize money is SEK 10 million (€914,000).
A reference to the first woman to win the award
Just hours before the 2022 prize was announced, Nobel communications officials recalled Elinor Ostrom, who was “the first woman to receive the prize” for her work on cooperation in the economic sciences, in 2009.
Source: El Diario
