Bernanke’s retirement plan: Buy and hold no-frills investments, keep it simple, write books

Bernanke financial disclosure shows no-frills plan

WASHINGTON — By day, Federal Reserve Chairman Ben Bernanke weighs dramatic acts to stabilize the U.S. economy. At home, he takes a more passive approach to finance.

Bernanke’s 2009 financial disclosure shows that he mostly left his money where it has been: in no-frills annuities, U.S. Treasury securities and mutual funds.

The only exception: He sold a Merrill Lynch mutual fund worth between $1,001 and $15,000.

Bernanke has been in crisis mode for the past three years, engineering vast financial bailouts and making critical decisions about how to wind down the Fed’s economic rescue programs.

He’s run meetings at which Fed governors decided to keep interest rates effectively at zero. That could explain why he earned less than $201 worth in interest on a cash account worth as much as $15,000 (or as little as $1,001).

Bernanke’s largest holdings are two annuities managed by TIAA-CREF, both parts of a retirement plan he set up while teaching at Princeton University. One is a fixed annuity. The other will return more if the markets perform well. Each is worth between $250,001 and $500,000. Each gained between $15,000 and $50,000 in value last year.

Those and other investments gained value last year as the financial markets recovered from their greatest shock in decades. Bernanke’s assets lost value in 2008 when the markets plunged.

His next-most valuable asset was a Suntrust money market account worth $100,001 to $250,000. The account earned between $201 and $1,000 in interest during 2009.

The total value of Bernanke’s assets in 2009 was between $1.2 million and $2.5 million. Taken together, the assets gained between $33,307 and $109,804 in value.

A former career academic, Bernanke collected royalties on two textbooks he wrote. The royalties for each book were between $100,001 and $1,000,000. They were his largest source of income aside from his Fed salary.