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THE COURAGE TO ACT

Name: THE COURAGE TO ACT
Author: Ben S. Bernanke
ISBN: 978-0-393-24721-3

A MEMOIR OF A CRISIS AND ITS AFTERMATH

by Ben S. Bernanke ‧ RELEASE DATE: Oct. 5, 2015

A sober but not dismal account of what’s been happening to our pocketbooks. Readers who wonder why raising the interest rate...

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Former Federal Reserve chair Bernanke (The Federal Reserve and the Financial Crisis, 2013) offers a view from the trenches of the Great Recession and its aftermath.

A framing figure in this lucid memoir, appearing early and late, is Alan Greenspan, Bernanke’s predecessor, who, it seems, saw trouble coming and did not act decisively. Bernanke cites Greenspan’s reluctance to subject whole categories of financial practices relating to mortgages to federal oversight, which opened the door to loopholes that contributed to the housing market collapse. “The hole in our logic,” writes Bernanke, “was that, as lending standards deteriorated, the exception became the rule.” Bernanke’s account of the Great Recession involves plenty of mea culpa pleading; he writes that in his time as a Fed governor leading up to his chairmanship, he and his fellow executives tended to underestimate the risks inherent in a loosely regulated market. He goes on to trace this fast-and-loose approach to legislative politics. For example, although Fannie Mae and Freddie Mac came close to catastrophic failure, congressional overseers were too enamored of the “ultimate free lunch” these agencies offered to pay much attention until it was almost too late. Bernanke, who has made news outside of but coincidental with this book by renouncing his former affiliation with the GOP, suggests that political gridlock has served as a tremendous brake on an economic recovery that should have been complete by now. The ongoing threat of government shutdown is an understandable deterrent to investment and consumer confidence. It helps to have wonky leanings to follow Bernanke’s arguments, which, though mostly nontechnical, can be a little daunting: “Futures markets gave us a reliable read of where markets thought the federal funds rate was going—but not for our securities purchases.”

A sober but not dismal account of what’s been happening to our pocketbooks. Readers who wonder why raising the interest rate is a big deal (and why not raising it may be a mistake) will find suggestive answers here.

Pub Date: Oct. 5, 2015

ISBN: 978-0-393-24721-3

Page Count: 610

Publisher: Norton

Review Posted Online: Oct. 9, 2015

Categories:

- BOOK REVIEW
21ST CENTURY MONETARY POLICY
by Ben S. Bernanke

- BOOK REVIEW
FIREFIGHTING
by Ben S. Bernanke & Timothy F. Geithner & Henry M. Paulson Jr.

- BOOK REVIEW
THE FEDERAL RESERVE AND THE FINANCIAL CRISIS
by Ben S. Bernanke

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THE PURSUIT OF HAPPYNESS

FROM MEAN STREETS TO WALL STREET

by Chris Gardner with Quincy Troupe ‧ RELEASE DATE: June 1, 2006

Well-told and admonitory.

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Young-rags-to-mature-riches memoir by broker and motivational speaker Gardner.

Born and raised in the Milwaukee ghetto, the author pulled himself up from considerable disadvantage. He was fatherless, and his adored mother wasn’t always around; once, as a child, he spied her at a family funeral accompanied by a prison guard. When beautiful, evanescent Moms was there, Chris also had to deal with Freddie “I ain’t your goddamn daddy!” Triplett, one of the meanest stepfathers in recent literature. Chris did “the dozens” with the homies, boosted a bit and in the course of youthful adventure was raped. His heroes were Miles Davis, James Brown and Muhammad Ali. Meanwhile, at the behest of Moms, he developed a fondness for reading. He joined the Navy and became a medic (preparing badass Marines for proctology), and a proficient lab technician. Moving up in San Francisco, married and then divorced, he sold medical supplies. He was recruited as a trainee at Dean Witter just around the time he became a homeless single father. All his belongings in a shopping cart, Gardner sometimes slept with his young son at the office (apparently undiscovered by the night cleaning crew). The two also frequently bedded down in a public restroom. After Gardner’s talents were finally appreciated by the firm of Bear Stearns, his American Dream became real. He got the cool duds, hot car and fine ladies so coveted from afar back in the day. He even had a meeting with Nelson Mandela. Through it all, he remained a prideful parent. His own no-daddy blues are gone now.

Well-told and admonitory.

Pub Date: June 1, 2006

ISBN: 0-06-074486-3

Page Count: 320

Publisher: Amistad/HarperCollins

Review Posted Online: May 19, 2010

Kirkus Reviews Issue: March 15, 2006

Categories:

GENERAL BIOGRAPHY & MEMOIR | BIOGRAPHY & MEMOIR | BUSINESS

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NIGHT

by Elie Wiesel & translated by Marion Wiesel ‧ RELEASE DATE: Jan. 16, 2006

The author's youthfulness helps to assure the inevitable comparison with the Anne Frank diary although over and above the...

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Elie Wiesel spent his early years in a small Transylvanian town as one of four children.

He was the only one of the family to survive what Francois Maurois, in his introduction, calls the "human holocaust" of the persecution of the Jews, which began with the restrictions, the singularization of the yellow star, the enclosure within the ghetto, and went on to the mass deportations to the ovens of Auschwitz and Buchenwald. There are unforgettable and horrifying scenes here in this spare and sombre memoir of this experience of the hanging of a child, of his first farewell with his father who leaves him an inheritance of a knife and a spoon, and of his last goodbye at Buchenwald his father's corpse is already cold let alone the long months of survival under unconscionable conditions.

The author's youthfulness helps to assure the inevitable comparison with the Anne Frank diary although over and above the sphere of suffering shared, and in this case extended to the death march itself, there is no spiritual or emotional legacy here to offset any reader reluctance.