The best book on the Fed in our time and a model of financial writing.
A wide-ranging study of the Federal Reserve and its almost unrestricted power over the U.S. economy.
“The Fed plays a quiet but critical part in shaping our everyday lives,” writes New York Times financial journalist Smialek in this surprisingly—given its subject—readable account. To fulfill its mission of controlling inflation and employment levels, it essentially has the power to print money without much in the way of oversight. For example, “during the 2008 financial crisis, chair Ben Bernanke unilaterally approved a $600 billion bond-buying program to shore up crumbling markets.” This independence has made the Fed “the most powerful economic institution the modern world has ever known.” It has also come with the understanding that the Fed is apolitical, as Donald Trump discovered when he attempted to bend the institution and its head, Jerome Powell, to his will to make him look good during the economic implosion of 2020. The pandemic figures heavily in Smialek’s detailed, cogent account, as the author illustrates how the bankers and economists who run the Fed are quick to abandon ideology and theory for practical solutions to the problems they face. Some of the Fed’s governors tend to free market fundamentalism, but when faced with crisis, they allow for quantitative easing to increase the liquidity of banks. During the pandemic, the Fed reduced interest rates to zero and allowed foreign banks easier access to dollars in a package indicating that “the Fed was trying to say that it would do whatever it took to restore markets to normality.” In 2021, the Fed’s strategies kept the global economy from collapsing, “demonstrating that the Fed’s powers could be wielded to address more of society’s challenges than anyone had previously imagined.” Today, as Smialek lays out in accessible prose, the Fed has a new battle to fight in attempting to curb inflation, which may bring about “another Fed evolution” in policy and practice.
The best book on the Fed in our time and a model of financial writing.Pub Date: Feb. 28, 2023
ISBN: 9780593320235
Page Count: 384
Publisher: Knopf
Review Posted Online: Dec. 13, 2022
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Jan. 1, 2023
Cogent, well-timed ideas for meeting today’s biggest challenges.
Helping liberals get out of their own way.
Klein, a New York Times columnist, and Thompson, an Atlantic staffer, lean to the left, but they aren’t interrogating the usual suspects. Aware that many conservatives have no interest in their opinions, the authors target their own side’s “pathologies.” Why do red states greenlight the kind of renewable energy projects that often languish in blue states? Why does liberal California have the nation’s most severe homelessness and housing affordability crises? One big reason: Liberal leadership has ensnared itself in a web of well-intentioned yet often onerous “goals, standards, and rules.” This “procedural kludge,” partially shaped by lawyers who pioneered a “democracy by lawsuit” strategy in the 1960s, threatens to stymie key breakthroughs. Consider the anti-pollution laws passed after World War II. In the decades since, homeowners’ groups in liberal locales have cited such statutes in lawsuits meant to stop new affordable housing. Today, these laws “block the clean energy projects” required to tackle climate change. Nuclear energy is “inarguably safer” than the fossil fuel variety, but because Washington doesn’t always “properly weigh risk,” it almost never builds new reactors. Meanwhile, technologies that may cure disease or slash the carbon footprint of cement production benefit from government support, but too often the grant process “rewards caution and punishes outsider thinking.” The authors call this style of governing “everything-bagel liberalism,” so named because of its many government mandates. Instead, they envision “a politics of abundance” that would remake travel, work, and health. This won’t happen without “changing the processes that make building and inventing so hard.” It’s time, then, to scrutinize everything from municipal zoning regulations to the paperwork requirements for scientists getting federal funding. The authors’ debut as a duo is very smart and eminently useful.
Cogent, well-timed ideas for meeting today’s biggest challenges.Pub Date: March 18, 2025
ISBN: 9781668023488
Page Count: 320
Publisher: Avid Reader Press
Review Posted Online: Jan. 16, 2025
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Feb. 15, 2025
BOOK REVIEW
Striking research showing the immense complexity of ordinary thought and revealing the identities of the gatekeepers in our...
A psychologist and Nobel Prize winner summarizes and synthesizes the recent decades of research on intuition and systematic thinking.
The author of several scholarly texts, Kahneman (Emeritus Psychology and Public Affairs/Princeton Univ.) now offers general readers not just the findings of psychological research but also a better understanding of how research questions arise and how scholars systematically frame and answer them. He begins with the distinction between System 1 and System 2 mental operations, the former referring to quick, automatic thought, the latter to more effortful, overt thinking. We rely heavily, writes, on System 1, resorting to the higher-energy System 2 only when we need or want to. Kahneman continually refers to System 2 as “lazy”: We don’t want to think rigorously about something. The author then explores the nuances of our two-system minds, showing how they perform in various situations. Psychological experiments have repeatedly revealed that our intuitions are generally wrong, that our assessments are based on biases and that our System 1 hates doubt and despises ambiguity. Kahneman largely avoids jargon; when he does use some (“heuristics,” for example), he argues that such terms really ought to join our everyday vocabulary. He reviews many fundamental concepts in psychology and statistics (regression to the mean, the narrative fallacy, the optimistic bias), showing how they relate to his overall concerns about how we think and why we make the decisions that we do. Some of the later chapters (dealing with risk-taking and statistics and probabilities) are denser than others (some readers may resent such demands on System 2!), but the passages that deal with the economic and political implications of the research are gripping.
Striking research showing the immense complexity of ordinary thought and revealing the identities of the gatekeepers in our minds.Pub Date: Nov. 1, 2011
ISBN: 978-0-374-27563-1
Page Count: 512
Publisher: Farrar, Straus and Giroux
Review Posted Online: Sept. 3, 2011
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Sept. 15, 2011
BOOK REVIEW
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