On Monday, the Nobel Prize in economics was awarded to Ben Bernanke, the former head of the US Central Bank (Fed), and his compatriots Douglas Diamond and Philip Dybwig for their work on financial crises and banks.

Their work “significantly improved our understanding of the role of banks in our economy, especially during the financial crisis, and how financial markets are regulated,” the Nobel committee said.

It also states that the research of this year’s laureates reduces the risks of financial crises turning into long-term recessions with severe consequences for society.

The Nobel committee recalls that Bernanke, appointed head of the Federal Reserve by former US President George Bush, analyzed the Great Depression of the 1930s and, among other things, showed how the panic that leads to the withdrawal of money from accounts was a decisive factor in deepening and prolonging the crisis.

As for this year’s two other laureates, Diamond and Dybwig, the Nobel committee says they presented a solution to the same problem Bernanke identified by showing the importance of public deposit insurance.

“When depositors know that the state has guaranteed their money, they no longer rush to the bank as soon as rumors about the bank’s problems begin,” says the same source.

Winners of the 2022 Nobel Prize

The Nobel Prize is the last to be awarded each year. Last Friday, the Nobel Peace Prize, the most anticipated this year in view of the war in Ukraine, was awarded to the Belarusian Ales Bialiatskyi, the Russian organization “Memorial” and the Center for Civil Liberties of Ukraine.

The day before, the 2022 Nobel Prize for Literature was awarded to the French writer Anne Hernaud “for the courage and clinical acuity with which she uncovers the roots, erasure and preservation of personal memory.”

Last Monday, the Royal Swedish Academy of Sciences awarded this year’s Nobel Prize in Medicine to Swedish researcher Svante Pääbo for his discoveries about the genomes of extinct hominins and human evolution.

Researchers Alain Aspect, John F. Clauser and Anton Zeilinger won the Nobel Prize in Physics on Tuesday for their experiments with entangled photons, establishing violations of Bell’s inequalities and pioneering the science of quantum information.

On Wednesday, the Nobel Prize in Chemistry was awarded to Carolyn R. Bertozzi, Morten Meldahl and C. Barry Sharpless for the development of click chemistry and bioorthogonal chemistry.

Thus, Barry Sharpless became only the fifth person in history to receive a second Nobel Prize, which was also awarded in 2001. This year’s Nobel Prize in Chemistry was also notable for two analysts’ favourites, Sharpless and Bertozzi winning the Nobel Prize, a vote by the Royal Swedish Academy of Sciences that is notoriously difficult to predict.

Last year, the Nobel Prize in Economics was awarded to economists David Card, Joshua Angrist, and Guido Imbens for “empirical contributions to labor economics” and “methodological contributions to causal analysis.”