The Federal Reserve enters its second day of the end-of-year policy meeting today with the news that Chairman Ben Bernanke is Time Magazine 's Person of the Year for 2009. Something tells us that Bernanke and the members of the Federal Open Market Committee will be able to keep their minds on the business at hand, as most economists and policy analysts expect the Fed to stick to what Reuters calls the current "super loose monetary policy stance." But as readers wait for a pronouncement later today, Time has a series of articles online about Bernanke and the Fed that are worth reading (and a photo gallery of Bernanke going back to his childhood as "the nerd from Dillon, South Carolina"). And this is not one of those "Person of the Year" selections based on the winner's sheer publicity. Time's editors are clearly crediting Bernanke with preventing the recession from getting worse. As Richard Stengel , Time's managing editor, writes: One scholar has written that the Great Depression of the 1930s could have been averted if the Federal Reserve at the time hadnt constricted the money supply, let a third of American banks go under and told Americans to tighten their belts. That scholar, Ben Bernanke, just happened to be chairman of the Federal Reserve when the economy this year appeared to be headed for a repeat performance. We've rarely had such a perfect revision of the cliché that those who do not learn from history are doomed to repeat it. Bernanke didn't just learn from history; he wrote it himself and was damned if he was going to repeat it. Bernanke decided to do the opposite of what the Fed did back in the '30s: he would loosen the money supply as far as it would go, he would save as many banks as he could, and he wasnt going to hector the American public about pulling up their socks. Read the full tribute to Bernanke here . And also be sure to read the Q&A between Time editors and Bernanke here .