Federal Reserve Chairman Ben Bernanke was named Person of the Year by Time magazine Wednesday, giving him a high-profile boost as he tries to fend off proposals that might weaken the Fed's independence. The selection puts the mild-mannered Bernanke, a former professor, in the company of US President Barack Obama, Pope John Paul II and Russian President Vladimir Putin, among other prominent world figures the magazine has picked in past years. The Senate is considering Bernanke's nomination to a second term to head the Fed - the US central bank - and while he is expected to win confirmation, criticism of the Fed among the public and members of Congress is at its highest in decades. Time credited the 56-year-old Bernanke with creative leadership that helped set the US economy on a path to recovery even as he and other policy makers remain concerned about a high unemployment rate of 10 percent. Bernanke “knows the economy would be much, much worse if the Fed had not taken such extreme measures to stop the panic,” Time said in its cover story on the central bank head. The magazine noted he had greatly expanded the Fed's power through his efforts to fight the financial crisis. Time's Person of the Year selection, widely watched in US media, is not meant to be celebratory but rather to focus on a world figure who has been highly influential in the past year. In picking Bernanke, Time passed over runners-up including House of Representatives Speaker Nancy Pelosi and Gen. Stanley McChrystal, the top US commander in Afghanistan, who riveted Washington for months with his troop
