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The Lords of Easy Money
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About This Book
The New York Times bestselling business journalist Christopher Leonard infiltrates one of America's most mysterious institutions—the Federal Reserve—to show how its policies over the past ten years have accelerated income inequality and put our country's economic stability at risk.If you asked most people what forces led to today's unprecedented income inequality and financial crashes, no one would say the Federal Reserve. For most of its history, the Fed has enjoyed the fawning adoration of the press. When the economy grew, it was credited to the Fed. When the economy imploded in 2008, the Fed got credit for rescuing us. But the Fed also has a unique power to reshape the American economy for the worse, which it did, fatefully, on November 4, 2010 through a radical intervention called quantitative easing. In just a few short years, the Fed more than quadrupled the money supply with one goal: to encourage banks and other investors to extend more risky debt. Leaders at the Fed knew that they were undertaking a bold experiment that would produce few real jobs, with long-term risks that were hard to measure. But the Fed proceeded anyway...and then found itself trapped. Once it printed all that money, there was no way to withdraw it from circulation. The Fed tried several times, only to see market start to crash, at which point the Fed turned the money spigot back on. That's what it did when COVID hit, printing 300 years' worth of money in two short months. Which brings us to now: Ten years on, the gap between the rich and poor has grown dramatically, stock prices are trading far above what's justified by actual corporate profits, corporate debt in America is at an all-time high, and this debt is being traded by big banks on Wall Street, leaving them vulnerable—just as they were during the mortgage boom. Middle-class wages have barely budged in a decade, and consumers are buried under credit card debt, car loan debt, and student debt. The Long Crash tells the shocking, riveting tale of how quantitative easing is imperiling the American economy through the story of the one man who tried to warn us. This will be the first inside story of how we really got here—and why we face a frightening future.
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Reviews
"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."
"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."
"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."
"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."
"Expect it to fall any minute now."
"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."
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