Ben Bernanke personal net worth takes a hit

Federal Reserve Chairman Ben S. Bernanke’s assets may have declined in 2010 even as the stock market improved. The central bank chief and his family owned financial assets valued between $1.06 million and $2.31 million, a lower range than the $1.15 million to $2.48 million reported last year, according to annual financial disclosures released by the Fed today. The forms from the Office of Government Ethics require officials to report only a range in the value of holdings. Bernanke’s two largest assets are retirement accounts, listed as TIAA Traditional and CREF Stock Large Cap Blend. Both were valued in a range of $500,001 to $1 million in both years. The Standard & Poor’s 500 Index rose 13 percent in 2010. Bernanke has fought the worst U.S. recession and financial crisis since the 1930s by lowering the benchmark U.S. interest rate to zero and embarking on two rounds of large-scale asset purchases that drove the Fed’s balance sheet to a record $2.88 trillion. Bernanke, 57, who succeeded Alan Greenspan as chairman in 2006 and began a second four-year term in 2010, earns a salary of $199,700, an amount set by Congress. A former Princeton professor, Bernanke earned between $150,000 and $1.1 million in royalties from textbooks last year. In 2009, he earned at least $200,000 from textbook royalties, more than his compensation as central bank chief. Regional Presidents The central bank’s annual report, released earlier this month, showed that the presidents of the Fed’s regional banks have the bigger salaries. William C. Dudley, the president of the Federal Reserve Bank of New York, earned $410,780 last year. The 11 regional bank presidents who were in office at the end of 2010 had total salaries of $3.8 million. Salaries of the reserve bank presidents are set by the Fed board with consideration for tenure and comparable executive salaries in their regions. The central bank today also released disclosures for the other members of the Fed’s Board of Governors and their families, showing that all five are millionaires. Vice Chairman Janet Yellen and her husband George Akerlof, a Nobel laureate, had assets between $5.1 million and $13.7 million, according to the disclosures. Governor Elizabeth Duke, a former banker, had at least $3 million in assets. Governor Sarah Bloom Raskin, a former Maryland banking regulator, and Governor Daniel Tarullo, a law professor at Georgetown University before joining the Fed, each had assets of at least $1 million. Bloomberg