Ben Bernanke does not deserve to be awarded a Nobel Prize in Economics

But then, again, economists have been awarded the Nobel for their anti-market economic thinking for decades.

Yesterday, Ben Bernanke, former Princeton economics professor and former Federal Reserve chairman, was awarded the Nobel Prize in Economics with two other economists for their contributions to our understanding of banking and  financial crises. 

Mark Thornton, Mises Institute Senior Fellow, is spot on with his critique of Bernanke’s view of banks and financial crises.  In fact, Bernanke, his fellow Fed governors and his predecessor, Alan Greenspan, were responsible for causing the dotcom and housing bubbles. 

In my book, Why the Federal Reserve Sucks, I devote a chapter each to Greenspan and Bernanke and reveal how their egregious polices for more than two decades caused back-to-back bubbles.  And Bernanke receives a hefty monetary gift and the prestige of being a Nobel Laurate even though he “blew” up the housing sector.  That’s like giving George W. Bush the Nobel Peace prize for his invasions of Afghanistan and Iraq.

It is ironic that Bernanke was awarded the Nobel Prize in Economics on the anniversary of Ludwig von Mises’s death (October 10) in 1973. 

Mises should have been awarded the Nobel for his many contributions to Economics.    

Instead, his student, F.A. Hayek, was awarded the Nobel Prize a year after Mises’s death for his contributions to our understanding of business cycles.  Without Mises’s pioneering work on business cycles Hayek probably would not have been awarded the Nobel. 

Nevertheless, if economists, Fed officials, money managers, business decision makers and the general public, want to understand financial crises, they should begin their educational journey by reading the books and essays by economists of the Austrian school.