



Trillion Dollar Triage
How Jay Powell and the Fed Battled a President and a Pandemic---and Prevented Economic Disaster
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4.3 • 14 Ratings
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- $14.99
Publisher Description
The inside story, told with “insight, perspective, and stellar reporting,” of how an unassuming civil servant created trillions of dollars from thin air, combatted a public health crisis, and saved the American economy from a second Great Depression (Alan S. Blinder, former Vice Chair of the Federal Reserve).
By February 2020, the U.S. economic expansion had become the longest on record. Unemployment was plumbing half-century lows. Stock markets soared to new highs. One month later, the public health battle against a deadly virus had pushed the economy into the equivalent of a medically induced coma. America’s workplaces—offices, shops, malls, and factories—shuttered. Many of the nation’s largest employers and tens of thousands of small businesses faced ruin. Over 22 million American jobs were lost. The extreme uncertainty led to some of the largest daily drops ever in the stock market.
Nick Timiraos, the Wall Street Journal’s chief economics correspondent, draws on extensive interviews to detail the tense meetings, late night phone calls, and crucial video conferences behind the largest, swiftest U.S. economic policy response since World War II. Trillion Dollar Triage goes inside the Federal Reserve, one of the country’s most important and least understood institutions, to chronicle how its plainspoken chairman, Jay Powell, unleashed an unprecedented monetary barrage to keep the economy on life support. With the bleeding stemmed, the Fed faced a new challenge: How to nurture a recovery without unleashing an inflation-fueling, bubble-blowing money bomb?
Trillion Dollar Triage is the definitive, gripping history of a creative and unprecedented battle to shield the American economy from the twin threats of a public health disaster and economic crisis. Economic theory and policy will never be the same.
PUBLISHERS WEEKLY
Federal Reserve chairman Jerome "Jay" Powell struggled to rescue the economy while fending off Donald Trump's harassment, according to this intricate study of the Covid-19 economic meltdown. Wall Street Journal correspondent Timiraos recounts Powell's tumultuous tenure from his appointment in February 2018 up to June 2021, focusing on how Trump tried to bully him into lowering interest rates. (Sample Trump tweet: "Who is our bigger enemy, Jay Powell or Chairman Xi?") When lockdowns tanked the economy in March 2020, the Fed turned to "shock-and-awe" measures, cutting interest rates nearly to zero while buying colossal quantities of bonds and lending oceans of money to banks and businesses; his efforts stabilized the financial sector—and, according to some critics, led to rising inflation in 2021. Timiraos weaves a lucid behind-the-scenes narrative of the early Covid panic, when Powell and the Fed staff struggled hour by hour to get money out to a collapsing economy and worked with Treasury Secretary Steve Mnuchin and a fractious Congress to cobble together emergency fiscal measures, while cogently exploring the economic trade-offs among unemployment, inflation, stability, and moral hazard. This is a riveting story of policy making in crisis and an illuminating examination of how drastically the Fed's role in the economy has changed.
Customer Reviews
Phenomenal
A truly excellent book that manages to be insightful and interesting to both people steeped in the material and those that are novices to central banking. This will be the first place people look to for the definitive biography of the Fed for the last few years.