Backstory: Banking on Bernanke

When Ben Bernanke was in his early teens, he was hooked on statistics - not about inflation or GDP but about strikeouts and RBIs. He and a friend, Nathan Goldman, spent countless hours sitting on the floor in the Bernanke home, first inventing and then playing a game that simulated the play-by-play action of professional baseball games.

A card represented each player. The competition, where a dice roll could result in a groundout or a run-batted-in, was intense. "They played to win," recalls Philip Bernanke, Ben's father.

But when his little sister, about 6 years old, wanted to get involved, Ben didn't shove her aside. He let her pick a player she could call her own: Dodger pitching ace Sandy Koufax.

This preoccupation of a boy in small-town South Carolina reveals some enduring aspects of the man who is now launching into a four-year term as chairman of the Federal Reserve, arguably the free world's most powerful unelected official.

At an early age, Ben Shalom Bernanke matched a typical teenager's love of sports with a drive for intellectual mastery. His algebraic talent for modeling a baseball league would grow, over time, into an economist's craft of modeling the national flow of goods, services, and money.

Along the way, his character was shaped not only by his love of baseball but also by a close African-American friend, a nurturing family, and a job waiting tables at a raucous roadside restaurant. At every step, from grade school to the halls of Harvard University, his talents and self-confidence have pushed him to the front of the class.

"He believes in himself," says Sharon Bernanke, his sister. "He's very direct.... Ben's just always been Ben."

Unlike a number of past Fed chairmen, he does not arrive on the job with a long track record as a public figure - either in government or in the corner office. Alan Greenspan came to the Fed as a well-known Wall Street economist who had advised President Nixon. Paul Volcker headed the prestigious Federal Reserve Bank of New York. G. William Miller was CEO of Textron.

By contrast, Dr. Bernanke is relatively new to the circles of the world's policymaking elite. His rise from Dillon, S.C. - a quiet town of 6,300 - has run along a largely academic track. That changed in 2002, when President Bush named him to one of seven slots on the Federal Reserve Board. Then, last June, he became chairman of the president's Council of Economic Advisers.

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But if he has spent little time in the limelight, Bernanke is hardly unprepared for the rigors of his new role. His recent post as a Fed governor has put him at Mr. Greenspan's side for three years, helping to shape the Fed's interest-rate policies. His academic research has focused on monetary policy and also on the roots of history's largest financial crisis, the Great Depression.

Equally important, friends and colleagues say, he brings crucial personal qualities - including an ability to listen and to lead - that have been developing since his youth in Dillon. Bernanke's father and uncle ran the pharmacy in town, and the family was one of a handful who kept a small local synagogue going. "He comes from a kosher household," Philip Bernanke says. "In the wilds of South Carolina, that's not easy."

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