... bracing and closely reported ... Leonard’s book is an indispensable account in many respects—his coverage of the invisible bailout of the repo market alone stands as a bracing case study in how the false pieties of quantitative easing directly stoked ruinous asset bubbles. But Leonard is also that rarest of financial reporters who conscientiously tracks the real-life consequences of the Olympian deliberations undertaken by the paper economy’s gatekeepers. All too many chronicles of monetary policy and market convulsions focus on outsize masters-of-the-universe storylines ... In The Lords of Easy Money we have a richly reported, accessible, biting, and long-overdue remedy to that system failure.
You 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.
There’s something undeniably gratifying about an elegantly crafted morality tale—and the business reporter Christopher Leonard has written a good one, even if you suspect that the full shape of it isn’t quite as smooth as he makes it out to be. The Lords of Easy Money is a fascinating and propulsive story about the Federal Reserve—yes, you read that right. Leonard, in the tradition of Michael Lewis, has taken an arcane subject, rife with the risk of incomprehensibility (or boredom), and built a riveting narrative in which the stakes couldn’t be any clearer ... All of this usefully highlights how extreme financialization has transformed (or deformed) the economy and our politics ... Still, The Lords of Easy Money presents the complexity of the current system as if it were merely disguising some unshakable fundamentals; there’s a satisfying clarity to reading a book that puts the jumble of political and economic turmoil into such stark narrative terms, but there’s more to the story than that.
It’s tough to turn the nuances of monetary policy into personality-driven narrative. But Christopher Leonard has succeeded in doing just that ... Weaving together narrative non-fiction with big ideas can be difficult. One of the best things about this book is that through Hoenig, Leonard, a business journalist, is able to tell the whole, complicated half-century story of how we got to where we are now in a way that isn’t at all wonky. There are real people here, making real decisions about the real world. What’s more, this isn’t just about 10 years of easy money. It’s about a culture in which the Fed has over the past several decades taken over from government as the key economic actor in the country.
Leonard writes vividly about a technical subject ... By focusing on a regional banker, Leonard offers a refreshingly non-Washington view ... The simplicity that is his strength is also the book’s weakness. The Lords of Easy Money is a one-sided assessment that squeezes Bernanke into a rather black hat ... Leonard blames the Fed for tolerating bubbles without acknowledging the topic’s (much-debated) complexity ... Leonard elsewhere stretches for the sake of narrative coherence ... The author is surely correct that many Americans view the Fed as an unelected power aligned with elites, perhaps contributing to the disaffection that exploded on Jan. 6, 2021. He might have explored their prejudices with more dispassion.
Leonard doesn’t have much time for formal economics. He plays fast and loose with terminology and economic logic. But we get his point and it is a good one. This has been an era of loose money and the benefits have been very unevenly distributed ... Rather than economics, Leonard’s preferred idioms are the standard story lines and characters of American populism. The Lords of Easy Money spins a tale of innocence betrayed that reads like an update of The Wizard of Oz ... The office politics of the Fed are well captured by Leonard, as is the intimidating physical setting...But all too often the treatment seems trite. Leonard makes much of Hoenig’s humble background. But much the same can be said of Bernanke and Yellen. If they favored monetary expansion it wasn’t out of any inherited affinity for Wall Street. Conversely, Powell is no doubt wealthy, but as Fed chair he has been more open to issues of social justice than any predecessor. The context of 2020 and Black Lives Matter demanded no less ... It would no doubt help if onetime central bankers, rather than cycling in and out of private finance, spoke out seriously in favor of reform. They would be doing the public a service if they spelled out the way that their hands were forced by the current incestuous intertwining of public debt markets with hedge funds and the like. Ultimately, however, it is politics that must grasp the nettle of change ... In the current dispensation, it may be flattering for central bankers to be cast as maestros, but in practice they are less the lords of easy money than its functionaries.
While the subject matter is tough slogging for those without a background in higher economics, Leonard strives to present the issues clearly but without oversimplification, and the patient reader will gain a greater understanding of economic issues that are affecting everyone’s lives.
Leonard shrewdly dissects the policy wrangles roiling the Fed behind its facade of technocratic consensus—he presents a sharp riposte to glowing accounts of former Fed chairman Ben Bernanke’s leadership—while offering a trenchant analysis of how the Fed controls and misshapes the economy. The result is a timely and persuasive challenge to the Fed’s new economic orthodoxy.
