Ben Bernanke, Former Chairman, Federal Reserve; Author, The Courage to Act: A Memoir of a Crisis and Its Aftermath
In conversation with Michael Moritz, Managing Partner, Sequoia Capital

Part of the Club’s Series on Ethics and Accountability, underwritten by the Charles Travers Family Foundation.

Bernanke was appointed chair of the Federal Reserve in 2006, capping a meteoric trajectory from a rural South Carolina childhood to professorships at Stanford and Princeton, to public service in Washington. There would be no time to celebrate, however; the bursting of the housing bubble in 2007 set off a domino effect that would bring the global financial system to the brink of meltdown.

Now, Bernanke pulls back the curtain on the tireless and ultimately successful efforts to prevent a mass economic collapse. Working with two U.S. presidents and two Treasury secretaries, Bernanke and his colleagues used every federal capability to keep the U.S. economy afloat.

From his arrival in Washington in 2002 to the intense days and weeks of the crisis, and through the Great Recession that followed, Bernanke presents an unequaled perspective on the American economy. For the first time, he reveals how the creativity and decisiveness of a few key leaders prevented an economic collapse of unimaginable scale.