1） Person of the Year - Ben Bernanke 
A bald man with a gray beard and tired eyes is sitting in his oversize Washington office, talking about the economy. He doesn't have a commanding presence. He isn't a mesmerizing speaker. He has none of the look-at-me swagger or listen-to-me charisma so common among men with oversize Washington offices. His arguments aren't partisan or ideological; they're methodical, grounded in data and the latest academic literature. When he doesn't know something, he doesn't bluster or bluff. He's professorial, which makes sense, because he spent most of his career as a professor.
He is not, in other words, a typical Beltway power broker. He's shy. He doesn't do the D.C. dinner-party circuit; he prefers to eat at home with his wife, who still makes him do the dishes and take out the trash. Then they do crosswords or read. Because Ben Bernanke is a nerd. He just happens to be the most powerful nerd on the planet.
Bernanke is the 56-year-old chairman of the Federal Reserve, the central bank of the U.S., the most important and least understood force shaping the American — and global — economy. Those green bills featuring dead Presidents are labeled "Federal Reserve Note" for a reason: the Fed controls the money supply. It is an independent government agency that conducts monetary policy, which means it sets short-term interest rates — which means it has immense influence over inflation, unemployment, the strength of the dollar and the strength of your wallet. And ever since global credit markets began imploding, its mild-mannered chairman has dramatically expanded those powers and reinvented the Fed.
Professor Bernanke of Princeton was a leading scholar of the Great Depression. He knew how the passive Fed of the 1930s helped create the calamity — through its stubborn refusal to expand the money supply and its tragic lack of imagination and experimentation. Chairman Bernanke of Washington was determined not to be the Fed chairman who presided over Depression 2.0. So when turbulence in U.S. housing markets metastasized into the worst global financial crisis in more than 75 years, he conjured up trillions of new dollars and blasted them into the economy; engineered massive public rescues of failing private companies; ratcheted down interest rates to zero; lent to mutual funds, hedge funds, foreign banks, investment banks, manufacturers, insurers and other borrowers who had never dreamed of receiving Fed cash; jump-started stalled credit markets in everything from car loans to corporate paper; revolutionized housing finance with a breathtaking shopping spree for mortgage bonds; blew up the Fed's balance sheet to three times its previous size; and generally transformed the staid arena of central banking into a stage for desperate improvisation. He didn't just reshape U.S. monetary policy; he led an effort to save the world economy.
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But the main reason Ben Shalom Bernanke is TIME's Person of the Year for 2009 is that he is the most important player guiding the world's most important economy. His creative leadership helped ensure that 2009 was a period of weak recovery rather than catastrophic depression, and he still wields unrivaled power over our money, our jobs, our savings and our national future. The decisions he has made, and those he has yet to make, will shape the path of our prosperity, the direction of our politics and our relationship to the world.
（2009 封面人物，The chairman of the Federal Reserve，Professor Bernanke of Princeton，第一次听说大名，居然都没关心过谁接班 Alan Greenspan。我总是很敬仰这种救世英雄的气质）
2） Chief of Staff - Rahm Emanue 
For a President who claimed to represent a new type of politics, Rahm Emanuel was certainly a surprising choice for chief of staff — he's a hard-cussing, old-school-campaign knife fighter and pragmatic congressional arm twister who plays to win. In the first year of the new Administration, the former No. 4 House Democrat has made his mark, overseeing an initial blitz of legislative achievements, including the $787 billion stimulus package and climate-change legislation in the House. His hallmark, beyond the salty language, has been a willingness to embrace the realities of legislative compromise. As Democratic Representative John Conyers of Michigan recently said in regard to health care, "That is essentially what Rahm Emanuel has said: Just give us anything, and we will declare victory."
（有一种人是King，还有一种人是King maker. 很是佩服这样的才气："Just give us anything, and we will declare victory." ）
4） Former Chairman of the NASDAQ - Bernie Madoff 
The admission that his money-management operation was a Ponzi scheme came in 2008, but 2009 was when the details about Bernie Madoff spilled out. The Nasdaq co-founder pleaded guilty (and added an "I'm sorry") in March to 11 felonies and was sentenced to 150 years in prison. The losses suffered by Madoff's investors, earlier thought to be as high as $70 billion, were revised by the victims' trustee down to $20 billion, of which lawyers have so far recovered $1.1 billion — by selling, among other things, a New York Mets jacket with Madoff embroidered on the back. The inspector general of the Securities and Exchange Commission issued a report that tried to explain why the agency hadn't caught Madoff's massive scam (the main verdict: SEC investigators were easily snowed). And at Butner Federal Correctional Complex in North Carolina in October, the 71-year-old Madoff reportedly got into his first prison fight — and won.
（一直没明白他犯的什么罪。有很多人鼓吹，投资率可以到10%呀。为什么他的投资人就那么单纯，就只能要10%利润，而不能亏本。 ）
5） Vice presidential nominee - Sarah Palin 
If you thought Sarah Palin was just going to fade back into the Alaskan wilderness after she and John McCain lost the 2008 presidential election, then you don't know Sarah. America's favorite Rorschach political figure is still going rogue, whether quitting her job as governor — who needs a bully pulpit when there's Facebook? — or spending her hour on Oprah dissing the 19-year-old father of her grandson. Will she run in 2012? Does it matter? In a Republican Party looking to be energized, Palin is the one drawing the crowds (even if they have to pay for a photo with her). She's their moose-huntin', "you betcha"–spouting, partisan jabbing sweetheart. Seventy percent of Americans may think Palin is unqualified to be President, but 100% of Palin supporters don't care.
（佩林的存在和奥巴马一样给我一个很好的感觉。感觉美国这个国家很新鲜活力，很有希望。）
6） Golf Pro - Tiger Woods 
Few people plummeted further in 2009 than golf's biggest star, who began the year as the world's richest athlete and ended it as a punch line. A mysterious car accident on Thanksgiving night shattered Woods' meticulously crafted image and touched off a frenzy of speculation over his behavior beyond the green. For Woods, the story was a nightmare; for the tabloids, it was a feast served as quickly as we could gobble it, each dish juicier than the last. As Woods stonewalled investigators, rumors that a marital rift precipitated the crash were seemingly validated by the emergence of a succession of women all claiming to have bedded the golfer. After Woods issued a tepid apology that failed to quash the ballooning scandal — which included a rumored split with wife Elin Nordegren and a frightening hospital visit for his visiting mother-in-law — he announced on Dec. 11 that he would take an indefinite hiatus from the links to patch up his personal life. He'd better hurry back, though — on Dec. 13, the consulting firm Accenture became the first major sponsor to sever its ties with the beleaguered star.
（老虎，流年不利。俺早就想说，钱这个东西够了就够了，多了很害人。）
7） 中国人民银行行长 - 周小川 
It isn't every day that a career bureaucrat in China, even one who heads Beijing's equivalent of the Federal Reserve Board, rattles the cages of traders in international markets the world over. Even with China's growing international economic clout, the mandarins who run the rapidly growing economy tend be faceless — and cautious to the extreme. That's why when Zhou Xiaochuan publicly called in March for the U.S. dollar to be eventually replaced as the globe's reserve currency, the world took note. The world's reserve currency, he noted archly, "should first be anchored to a stable benchmark, and issued according to a clear set of rules." The implied rebuke: by those standards, the dollar was 0 for 2.
Zhou, 61, was simply saying what many Chinese officials privately feel: that Beijing, as the largest international holder of Treasury debt, has been unnerved by U.S. budget deficits and an apparent willingness to allow the dollar to decline against other currencies (which effectively devalues China's holdings of Treasuries.) That he spoke out, colleagues at the People's Bank of China say, was not necessarily a surprise. Zhou, says a former PBOC economist, "is intelligent, intellectually curious, and has always been willing to speak his mind."
（中国人民从此站起来了。）
Time 列出25 people who mattered in 2009. 摘出几个俺感兴趣的。
