MixedThe Wall Street Journal[Bernanke] delivers the mix of exquisite chutzpah and awful timing that we’ve come to expect from Federal Reserve chiefs ... In a mercy to the lay reader, Mr. Bernanke sets out his argument mainly via historical narrative, rather than a string of data tables and equations ... A glaring omission from Mr. Bernanke’s book is any sense that central-bank policies may themselves contribute to the negative productivity, employment or output trends to which—as Mr. Bernanke and so many others believe—a central bank merely reacts ... there are other serious omissions, including an awful lot of awfully important fiscal policy. Mr. Bernanke is sometimes happy to talk about tax policy (he’s not a fan of his predecessor Alan Greenspan’s occasional advocacy for tax cuts) and regulatory matters concerning the financial system, such as the postcrisis Dodd-Frank law. But the most significant piece of economic legislation to land during his tenure—the Affordable Care Act, or ObamaCare—doesn’t warrant a single mention ... We also need to talk more than Mr. Bernanke does about the ramifications of massive government debt ... That’s all economics, though, and Mr. Bernanke’s book is best read as a political rather than an economic treatise ... All of this feeds into the most foolish thing about Mr. Bernanke’s book, which is his timing. The difficulty lies only partly in his writing a long paean to Fed sagacity just as the Fed is forced to admit it messed up on inflation. Rather, inflation and the Fed’s belated scramble to raise rates and scale back on quantitative easing have revealed that we are still only in the middle of a monetary cycle that began around the 2007-08 panic. Central banks have no idea whether these policies are sustainable for the longer term (increasingly it appears that they aren’t). We also have no clear idea of how to get out of them, and what the economic implications of the attempt might be ... Before the Fed demands ever-greater powers, how about it figures out what it’s doing with the policy tools it already has?
Christopher Leonard
PositiveThe Wall Street JournalYou don’t ordinarily turn to a book about the Federal Reserve for comedy, and for the most part Christopher Leonard’s The Lords of Easy Money: How the Federal Reserve Broke the American Economy stays true to its genre. Mr. Leonard does, however, include one pointedly humorous moment that sheds light on so much of his subject matter ... Mr. Leonard, an investigative journalist, so skillfully tells the story of how, over several decades, a phalanx of economic sophisticates at the Fed have badly misunderstood the U.S. economy and often come up with policies that fail to produce the intended results ... Mr. Hoenig was often portrayed in the media as a monetary hawk for his ornery votes against expanded Fed interventions. Mr. Leonard offers a more nuanced view ... Mr. Leonard’s other hero is John Feltner ... Stories such as Mr. Feltner’s are too often presented as morality tales about corporate greed. Mr. Leonard refreshingly explains the precise policy incentives at work.
Jacob Helberg
PanThe Wall Street JournalA worthwhile meditation on this so-called gray war might reflect on how we often wage such a war on ourselves ... Alas, Mr. Helberg focuses only on the foes outside the gates. He is correct that malign foreign powers view the internet as a battlefield on which to wage asymmetric war. He offers a comprehensive, if often jumbled, account of the forms such warfare can take ... Mr. Helberg, a senior adviser at Stanford University’s Center on Geopolitics and Technology, has little new to offer about the contours of these conflicts. This is especially irritating given his past as a Google senior manager ... Mr. Helberg’s caginess about what Google and other tech companies know about such malign online activities (and what they are doing about it) undermines the author’s policy recommendations, which boil down to \'trust us elites more.\'
Daniel Yergin
PositiveThe Wall Street JournalThis is, at heart, a very American tale of buccaneering, can-do spirit ... One thread running through this book—which the author should have tugged on a bit harder—is that shale is the private sector’s game ... Mr. Yergin’s account is reportorial and supremely readable—no mean feat among geostrategy tomes. But he’s one of the world’s foremost experts on this topic; the reader wishes he would insert more of his own views into the book.
Daron Acemoglu
PanThe Wall Street JournalThere’s some insight here, although not vast stores of novelty ... Alas, these kernels of insight come with substantial padding in a maddeningly episodic book of more than 500 pages. African tribes, Chinese emperors, Enlightenment philosophers, religious prophets and Founding Fathers drift in and out of focus, yet the book never gives a coherent account of how society might find its way into the narrow corridor or why it might permit itself to drift out of one ... When the authors do focus on a historical example, the results are unconvincing. Their potted history of America—which will garner them praise for their frontal assault on American exceptionalism—is hopelessly confused ... The relationship between state and society on the question of slavery and race in America is complex, rarely happy—and instructive. Yet at most turns the authors seem to get it backward.
Yanis Varoufakis
MixedThe Wall Street JournalHe offers a gripping account of those chaotic days, when the eurozone appeared as if it might shatter. But there’s less 'deep establishment' here than meets the eye. What emerges instead is a story of miscalculations, many of them the author’s own ... for all his financial acumen, Mr. Varoufakis was—and, to judge by his memoir, remains—a political naif. Not even the threat of Grexit could have upset the creditors’ consensus. And as much as the Greeks hated the bailouts, they, too, concluded that they would be worse off leaving the euro ... A better deal for Greece may exist, but Mr. Varoufakis was never the one to propose it. Even in his own book he appears as a hapless academic cursed by prodigious knowledge and limited wisdom. No wonder it all went so terribly wrong.
