In Fed We Trust; Ben Bernanke's War on the Great Panic

New York: Crown Business, 2009. First Edition [stated] Presumed first printing based on Random House convention. Hardcover. Very good/Very good. Jay Mallin (author photograph). xii, 323, [1] pages. Dramatis Personae. Notes. Glossary. Selected Bibliography. Index. Inscribed by the author on the title page. Inscription reads To Cindy & Rich Enjoy! David Wessel. How The Federal Reserve Became The Fourth Branch Of Government [from the front of the dust jacket]. David Meyer Wessel (born February 21, 1954) is an American journalist and writer. He has shared two Pulitzer Prizes for journalism. He is director of the Hutchins Center on Fiscal & Monetary Policy at the Brookings Institution and a contributing correspondent to The Wall Street Journal, where he worked for 30 years. Wessel appears frequently on National Public Radio's Morning Edition. Wessel began his reporting career at the Middletown, Connecticut Press in 1975 and joined the staff of the Hartford Courant in 1977. He left Hartford in 1980 to spend a year as a Knight-Bagehot Fellow in Business and Economics Journalism at Columbia's Graduate School of Journalism. He moved to The Boston Globe in 1981 and was hired in 1983 as a reporter in The Wall Street Journal's Boston bureau. He transferred to the Washington, D.C. bureau in 1987 and worked there for the duration of his time at the WSJ, except for a brief period as the paper's Berlin bureau chief in 1999-2000. On December 4, 2013, The Brookings Institution announced that Wessel would become the founding director of its new Hutchins Center on Fiscal and Monetary Policy. Wessel is the author of several books and the editor of Central Banking after the Great Recession (2014), which features an interview between Ben Bernanke and Liaquat Ahamed. This breakout book on the financial crisis is Pulitzer Prize-winner Wessel's inside account of the struggle of Federal Reserve Chairman Ben Bernanke and his financial firefighters to keep the Great Panic from becoming the next Great Depression. " Whatever it takes" That was Federal Reserve Chairman Ben Bernanke's vow as the worst financial panic in more than fifty years gripped the world and he struggled to avoid the once unthinkable: a repeat of the Great Depression. Brilliant but temperamentally cautious, Bernanke researched and wrote about the causes of the Depression during his career as an academic. Then when thrust into a role as one of the most important people in the world, he was compelled to boldness by circumstances he never anticipated. The president of the United States can respond instantly to a missile attack with America's military might, but he cannot respond to a financial crisis with real money unless Congress acts. The Fed chairman can. Bernanke did. Under his leadership the Fed spearheaded the biggest government intervention in more than half a century and effectively became the fourth branch of government, with no direct accountability to the nation's voters. Believing that the economic catastrophe of the 1930s was largely the fault of a sluggish and wrongheaded Federal Reserve, Bernanke was determined not to repeat that epic mistake. In this penetrating look inside the most powerful economic institution in the world, David Wessel illuminates its opaque and undemocratic inner workings, while revealing how the Bernanke Fed led the desperate effort to prevent the world's financial engine from grinding to a halt. In piecing together the fullest, most authoritative, and alarming picture yet of this decisive moment in our nation's history, In Fed We Trust answers the most critical questions. Among them: · What did Bernanke and his team at the Fed know , and what took them by surprise? Which of their actions stretched, or even ripped through, the Fed's legal authority? Which chilling numbers and indicators made them feel they had no choice? · What were they thinking at pivotal moments during the race to sell Bear Stearns, the unsuccessful quest to save Lehman Brothers, and the virtual nationalization of AIG, Fannie Mae, and Freddie Mac? What were they saying to one another when, as Bernanke put it to Wessel: We came very close to Depression 2.0 ? · How well did Bernanke, former treasury secretary Hank Paulson, and then New York Fed president Tim Geithner perform under intense pressure? and · How well did Bernanke, former treasury secretary Hank Paulson, and then New York Fed president Tim Geithner perform under intense pressure? · How did the crisis prompt a reappraisal of the once-impregnable reputation of Alan Greenspan? In Fed We Trust is a breathtaking and singularly perceptive look at a historic episode in American and global economic history.