Ben Bernanke, interviewed in this issue, is the Howard Harrison and Gabrielle Snyder Beck Professor of Economics and Public Affairs at Princeton University, and, since 1996, Chair of the Department of Economics. He is currently Director of the Monetary Economics Program at the National Bureau of Economic Research, where he has also acted as co-editor of the NBER Macroeconomics Annual. Professor Bernanke is also one of the six economists who form the NBER Business Cycle Dating Committee, a group that determines the dates of recessions in the US. Professor Bernanke is a leading macroeconomist who has contributed extensively to the journal literature on business cycles, monetary policy, the role of financial markets in economic fluctuations, inflation targeting and the economics of the Great Depression. His recent books include Inflation Targeting: Lessons from the International Experience (co-authored with T. Laubach, F. Mishkin and A. Posen, Princeton University Press, 1999); Essays on the Great Depression (Princeton University Press, 2000); Principles of Economics (co-authored with R. Frank, McGraw- Hill, 2000), and Macroeconomics (co-authored with A. Abel, Addison- Wesley, 4th edition, 2001).