Ben Bernanke won the “Person of the Year” title by Time Magazine

Ben Bernanke, a soft-spoken, analytical man tasked with balancing America's shaky finances, has been named Time magazine's "person of the year," defeating opposition from the top US commander in Afghanistan, the first female speaker of Congress, and China's enormous number of low-level workers. Bernanke, the 56-year-old chairman of the US Federal Reserve, was named "the most powerful geek in the world" by Time, which is one of the interesting facts about Ben Bernanke that you may not know. According to the magazine, he should be given the most credit for changing US monetary policy and for spearheading an initiative to save the world economy from certain doom.

The honor arrives at a difficult moment for Bernanke, whose decision to serve a second term at the Federal Reserve has angered some senators in the US and who may lose some of the Fed's independence under a new supervision system that Congress is considering. Richard Stengel, the managing editor of Time, stated that Bernanke "truly stood for what transpired this year more than the others." Bernanke, an expert on the Great Depression of the 1930s, was determined to avoid austerity because he thought it would have compounded the effects of that historic slump. He has played a key role in developing the US government's $700 billion (£425 billion) financial rescue plan since the start of the credit crisis. Under his leadership, the Fed reduced interest rates to almost zero and pumped massive quantities of liquidity into the US economy by making cheap money available to the markets.