Limitless
The Federal Reserve Takes on a New Age of Crisis
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- $18.99
Publisher Description
AN NPR BEST BOOK OF THE YEAR • This fascinating deep dive into one of the most powerful and least understood American institutions—the Federal Reserve—is “a riveting narrative...[and] an invaluable guide to the monetary policy debates of the last few years" (Liaquat Ahamed, Pulitzer Prize-winning author of Lords of Finance).
“The best book on the Fed in our time and a model of financial writing.” –Kirkus
The marble halls of the Federal Reserve have always held secrets; for decades the Fed did the utmost to preserve its room to maneuver, operating behind the scenes as much as possible. Yet over the past two decades, this elite world of bankers and economists speaking a language that only monetary experts could understand has been forced to change its ways. Amid rising inequality, weakening global economic prospects, and a pandemic, the central bank has entered into a new era of transparency and activism that has changed its role in modern society in subtle but remarkable ways.
Limitless tells the inside story of this deeply impactful transformation, and what it means for ordinary Americans. Focusing on characters such as the Fed chairman Jerome Powell; the Vice Chair for Supervision Randal Quarles; Vice Chair Lael Brainard; the Minneapolis Fed president Neel Kashkari; and the long-ago Fed Chair Marriner S. Eccles—and driven by the rising tension between Main Street and Wall Street—this is a page-turning account of the modern Fed’s inner workings during a crucial inflection point in history.
PUBLISHERS WEEKLY
Over the past few years, America's central bank has taken on vast new powers to regulate businesses and the economy, according to this probing study. Smialek, the Federal Reserve correspondent for the New York Times, provides a moment-by-moment account of efforts by Fed chairman Jerome Powell and other officials to avoid economic collapse during the Covid-19 lockdowns instituted in March 2020. Exceeding its usual purview of lending to banks and buying Treasury bonds, the Fed provided loans directly to Main Street businesses and bought vast quantities of corporate bonds and other private debt. Equally important, she notes, was the Fed's shift from adjusting interest rates to subdue inflation to keeping them as low as possible to maintain full employment—a focus that, critics contend, allowed the current inflation surge to take root in 2021. Smialek dramatically describes the pandemic's financial chaos—Fed economist Andreas Lehnert "was in his office plugging away, messaging colleagues and liaising with lawyers, when the next morning dawned, strange and terrifying"—and provides lucid sketches of Fed history, analyses of financial markets, and explorations of the impact of Fed policy on everything from wealth inequality to climate change. The result is a timely and insightful primer on one of America's most powerful and least understood institutions.
