Source:
NZHEngulfed by economic and financial turbulence, Federal Reserve chairman Ben Bernanke has taken extraordinary steps to ease America's problems. His own finances are more straightforward.
The chairman's financial disclosure form, released yesterday, showed his holdings last year were in no-fills investments, including United States Treasury securities, Canadian Treasury bonds, mutual funds and annuities.
Bernanke, 54, took over the central bank in February 2006, succeeding longtime chairman Alan Greenspan, who also played it safe when it came to his own investments while at the Fed.
Over the past year, Bernanke has been in crisis-management mode, trying to prevent housing, credit and financial debacles from sinking the economy. The Fed has aggressively sliced interest rates to shore up activity and taken several other actions, some unprecedented, to prop up the system.
An economist who spent most of his career in academia, including teaching at Princeton, Bernanke also is receiving royalties on two textbooks he wrote. The documents showed royalty income was listed at between US$50,001 ($65,780) and US$100,000 for each textbook, the largest single slices of income other than his Fed salary.
Bernanke's salary last year was US$186,600. This year it rises to US$191,300.
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