Smialek’s book is the most comprehensive study to date explaining the Federal Reserve’s historical and current inner battles to handle the United States’ economic crises ... This book will likely interest scholars. Recommended for collections in the social and behavioral sciences.
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 ... 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.
A moment-by-moment account of efforts... to avoid economic collapse during the Covid-19 lockdowns ... Smialek dramatically describes the pandemic’s financial chaos... 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.
