82 of 88 people found the following review helpful:
2.0 out of 5 stars
Trivia in place of analysis, December 2, 2009
This review is from: In Fed We Trust: Ben Bernanke's War on the Great Panic (Hardcover)
I am an academic economist doing research on the financial crisis. I read Wessel's book for details about the interventions by the Fed and Treasury in 2008 that I might not have encountered elsewhere. I was not expecting an academic treatise, and my negative review is not in any way related to the journalistic approach taken by the author.
Wessel is the economics editor at the Wall Street Journal and appears to have had a great deal of access to Bernanke and Geithner. His insider's perspective unfortunately produced very little insight. You can learn (p.115 AND p.192) that Bernanke used a "Polycom" speakerphone, but not that Hank Paulson and Richard Fuld were bitter rivals.
On a more substantive level, the book continually updates a "dashboard" with the Dow Jones average and the market cap of Citigroup. The success of each intervention is judged by the reaction of the stock market, generally within the day, to the policy. Does Wessel not remember that the Dow hit an all time high in October 2007, six months after subprime problems had emerged at Bear Stearns?
There is almost no discussion of the complex, leveraged financial instruments (e.g. CDOs and CDS) that amplified the crisis and made traditional monetary policy ineffective. A more thorough account would have also explored the regulatory failure of the Fed and federal government prior to the crisis.
On balance, the book is too narrow for someone just trying to go beyond the headlines and too superficial for those looking ahead to the next crisis.
Help other customers find the most helpful reviews
Was this review helpful to you? Yes
No
80 of 100 people found the following review helpful:
2.0 out of 5 stars
Ignore the hoopla: nothing earth-shattering offered, August 12, 2009
This review is from: In Fed We Trust: Ben Bernanke's War on the Great Panic (Hardcover)
This book is about how Ben Bernanke / The Fed battled against "The Great Panic" that besieged us. It reads like a fairly dry history of what transpired - kind of like a summary of what we've been watching on CNBC the last 2 years. Somehow Wessel took one of the most exciting moments in our current lives and made it almost bland and somewhat boring. Sure, there are some juicy facts but only after you get through more than half of the book. Overall, there is not much revealed that's earth-shattering if you kept abreast of what happened during this time. The book is at times choppy in motion and repetitive in content. I found that the first half of the book was a waste of my time -- the set-up the author felt necessary could have been presented much more succinctly. Example: there is a section within Bernanke's biographical chapter that details a prank he played on President Bush one day by coordinating the whole economic staff, along with even Dick Cheney, to wear tan socks as an inside joke among Bernanke and Bush. There are other strange off-topic insertions, like the curious offering that Donald Kohn, Fed Vice-Chair, lived in his son's basement for a while and that he used to ride his bike to work, parking his bike in the Fed garage that was reserved for its governors' cars. And that he liked to run up and down the stairs of the Fed building. Uh, huh.
The first inclination you have when you pick up this book is to dive in deep and fast to find out what went on in the minds of Bernanke, Paulson, and Geithner, among others. There must have been some amazing discussions, fraught with fear but Wessel never quite captures this for the reader to experience. Instead of providing a window into these men's thoughts / thought processes during this pivotal, riveting time, the book doesn't go far beyond merely reciting the actions they took, with some quotes from these men, scattered in as almost afterthoughts. [The footnote style is arguably incomplete with respect to some quotes.]
Overall disappointing. Wessels' cursory conclusions end up sounding rudimentary - likely attributable to what was probably a rush to publish and capitalize on the current curiosity-- which is understandable. But, there is still more to this subject. As of today's FOMC meeting, the Fed still hasn't started to unwind its actions. So, the book seems to be a bit early. Wessel even mentions that Hank Paulson is in the process of penning his own account of the economic crisis. Maybe Paulson will take us deeper into the minds of the big players during this frightful period, even if it is through his eyes, and not a third party's.
Help other customers find the most helpful reviews
Was this review helpful to you? Yes
No
88 of 116 people found the following review helpful:
4.0 out of 5 stars
You Will Never Trust the Fed Again., August 5, 2009
This review is from: In Fed We Trust: Ben Bernanke's War on the Great Panic (Hardcover)
David Wessel says the Fed was bad when it didn't act or warn despite knowing calamity was at hand. He says their money-aggressiveness saved the financial sector, its leaders and preserved the bonus system. Salaries at the Fed are quite high and it is on a major hiring spree. This is the story of how power players quickly used trillions of public dollars to pay both winners and losers of the Great Derivatives Game.
According to Wessel, the raison d'être of the Fed is to regulate credit, to oversee fiat money - that if money were only Gold and Silver coin, we wouldn't have a central bank. The Fed uses Federal Reserve Notes as a substitute and that is the first key to understanding its power. That's how central banks got started, beginning in 17th century Britain.
We get historical background - the significance of the Panic of 1907 as well as The Great Depression in creating the Federal Reserve as it used to be. Then the book gets interesting starting when chairman Alan Greenspan became a celebrity and decisions were made that eventually helped lead to The Great Panic, with additional actors playing important roles.
The book indirectly leads to the conclusion that the Fed is the major beneficiary of the crisis, gaining powers to pour liquidity on the fire selectivity. Wessel calls the Fed the Fourth Branch of Government and warns it's not directly accountable to voters.
Wessel enumerates the people who created and benefited from what he calls "The Great Panic." He cites the Fed a 3-pronged contribution: keeping interest rates too low for too long; not using its regulatory powers; and Greenspan successfully advocating the view that markets self-regulate. He contends Greenspan believed the rich and powerful would keep the financial game going because they held such a strong interest in it. Greenspan later said in a type of admission that his world view was wrong.
The book gives the chronological order of the Fed's response to The Great Panic: it rescued Bear, not Lehman for lack of a Plan B when there was no buyer, the AIG fiasco and everything else. Wessel says the Fed, with its huge staff of PhD economists and insider connections, didn't understand AIG. Perhaps it is too disturbing to contemplate whether the Fed understood AIG's situation.
AIG had been doing unregulated derivative deals with major investment firms. Early in the previous administration, Congress drove through a law that forbade government to regulate derivatives. Before then, regulatory agencies weren't regulating derivatives, but the the financial industry feared the possibility of regulation. Then the derivatives game exploded, going from billions to hundreds of trillions - an absurd situation that made some people very rich, very quickly. Warren Buffett famously called derivatives "weapons of mass destruction." One might expect this to someday blow up, but public funds were not then expected to backstop those that couldn't pay up.
AIG derivatives traders wrote and sold losing derivatives. These derivatives matured years later. In return for taking the wrong side of the bet, they received cash up-front. Goldman Sachs and many investment banks from around the world bought into the scheme, which promised enormous returns that one could never get in a normal investment, but they had to pay AIG a fee for each contract.
AIG took the windfall cash receipts and paid them out as huge multi-million dollar bonuses. At the same time, the ratings agencies had no problem with AIG. We are told the Fed failed to understand that AIG would not have the money and that it would be of a magnitude beyond anything any corporation on earth could pay. Wessel seems overly diplomatic in his approach.
Due to the size of the matter and the possibility that government would not be able to contain the panic unless it took the position that it would not enforce unregulated derivative contracts, the Fed provided trillions quickly and without transparency. Taxpayer money immediately got routed through AIG and paid out to Goldman Sachs and others.
Time was of the essence and political leadership was lacking. The Fed moved decisively when the country was most exposed with a disengaged President at the end of his second term.
The book explains the political position of the Fed and Ben Bernanke, and the near inevitability of increased power residing in the Fed (Obama's plan) or conversely increasing transparency (Ron Paul's bill). The Fed is fighting against transparency. It even hired a former Enron employee as its lobbyist to Congress.
In Fed We Trust provides this lesson on how the Fed should respond to deflationary crises (panics): To save the country, you must save the existing financial system. To save the financial system, you can't help but bailout those sharing responsibility for the problem and you even utilize them to help fix the problem. It's unfair but Wessel warns against populist sentiments. Then you put better regulation in place. Further, you maintain foreign confidence in the Fed with special attention to China. This points to Ben Bernanke remaining in place to show continuity in both the Fed and the White House.
Surely Wessel has a point about not going overboard with populist sentiments. And we can't argue with the fact that without the Fed's supernumerary powers, our collapse could have become an immediate Depression unless the government had chosen not to enforce unregulated derivative contracts.
Quite apparently, something is terribly wrong. To end up debating how much power the Fed should have in the face of the favoritism it has shown demonstrates how far the nation has been knocked off course. Citizens need only visit a bank for a mortgage or business loan to verify that we are no beneficiaries of Fed largess. Soon there will be additional taxes to pay.
Help other customers find the most helpful reviews
Was this review helpful to you? Yes
No
![[Start the discussion]](http://g-ecx.images-amazon.com/images/G/01/x-locale/communities/discussion_boards/start-new-discussion-sec._V192250339_.gif){kind=small}
