Fed Up: An Insider's Take on Why the Federal Reserve Is Bad for America, Hardcover

Descriere

A Federal Reserve insider pulls back the curtain on the secretive institution that controls America's economy After correctly predicting the housing crash of 2008 and quitting her high-ranking Wall Street job, Danielle Di Martino Booth was surprised to find herself recruited as an analyst at the Federal Reserve Bank of Dallas, one of the regional centers of our complicated and widely misunderstood Federal Reserve System. She was shocked to discover just how much tunnel vision, arrogance, liberal dogma, and abuse of power drove the core policies of the Fed. Di Martino Booth found a cabal of unelected academics who made decisions without the slightest understanding of the real world, just a slavish devo-tion to their theoretical models. Over the next nine years, she and her boss, Richard Fisher, tried to speak up about the dangers of Fed policies such as quanti-tative easing and deeply depressed interest rates. But as she puts it, ""In a world rendered unsafe by banks that were too big to fail, we came to understand that the Fed was simply too big to fight."" Now Di Martino Booth explains what really happened to our economy after the fateful date of December 8, 2008, when the Federal Open Market Committee approved a grand and unprecedented ex-periment: lowering interest rates to zero and flooding America with easy money. As she feared, millions of individuals, small businesses, and major corporations made rational choices that didn't line up with the Fed's ""wealth effect"" models. The result: eight years and counting of a sluggish ""recovery"" that barely feels like a recovery at all. While easy money has kept Wall Street and the wealthy afloat and thriving, Main Street isn't doing so well. Nearly half of men eighteen to thirty-four live with their parents, the highest level since the end of the Great Depression. Incomes are barely increasing for anyone not in the top ten percent of earners. And for those approaching or already in retirement, extremely low interest rates have