Ben Bernanke, who stepped down last month after eight years as chairman of the Federal Reserve, is planning a memoir.
Bernanke says he will focus not just on the defining moment of his time at the Fed, the 2008 financial crisis, but on the "Great Recession" that followed.
"I want people to understand what we knew, when we knew it, how we made decisions and how we dealt with the enormous economic uncertainty," said Bernanke, who expects to begin meeting with publishers within the next several weeks.
Bernanke, 60, says he will cover his entire career at the Fed, starting in 2002, when he joined the Board of Governors. He was appointed chairman in 2006 by President George W Bush, a Republican, and reappointed four years later by President Barack Obama, a Democrat.
A former professor and head of the economics department at Princeton University, Bernanke is currently a fellow at the Brookings Institution.
Few Fed chairmen confronted such profound challenges or became so controversial. Under his leadership, the Fed invoked all its conventional tools to salvage the economy. Once those were exhausted, Bernanke turned to extraordinary steps never before tried by the Fed.
Bernanke said he had not yet started the book, but had been organising his thoughts and expected to take about a year to finish. He said he will write the book himself, although he will likely have help with research.
Negotiations with publishers will be handled by Washington attorney Robert Barnett, who also represented Bernanke's predecessor at the Fed, Alan Greenspan. The deal for Greenspan's The Age of Turbulence, published in 2007, was reportedly worth more than $US8 million ($A8.88 million).
Bernanke's previous books include Essays on the Great Depression, published in 2000.
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