Overview

Stephen Axilrod is the ultimate Federal Reserve insider. He worked at the Fed's Board of Governors for over thirty years and after that in private markets and as a consultant on monetary policy. With Inside the Fed, he offers his unique perspective on the inner workings of the Federal Reserve System during the last fifty years--writing about personalities as much as policy--based on his knowledge and observations of every Fed chairman since 1951. Axilrod's discussion focuses on how the personalities of the various chairmen affected their capacity for leadership. He describes, for example, Arthur Burns's response to political pressure from the Nixon White House and Paul Volcker's radical shift to an anti-inflationary policy at the end of the 1970s--a transition in which Axilrod himself played a crucial role. As for the Greenspan years, Axilrod points to the unintended effects of the Fed's newfound ""garrulousness"" (the plethora of announcements and hints about policy intentions)--one of which was the Fed's loss of credibility in the aftermath of the chairman's 1996 comment about ""irrational exuberance."" And Axilrod incisively outlines the problems--including the subprime mess--inherited from Greenspan by the current chairman, Ben Bernanke. Great leadership in monetary policy, Axilrod says, is determined not by pure economic sophistication but by the ability to push through political and social barriers to achieve a paradigm shift in policy--and by the courage and bureaucratic moxie to pull it off.

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9780262012492

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Reviews

Informative and insightful, this view of the inner workings of the Fed will appeal to anyone with an interest in economics of curious about the organization's recent progression. -- Publishers Weekly An intimate account of the Fed's depressing decline in the seventies and dramatic comeback in the Volcker years when the central bank triumphed over the biggest threat to the U.S. economy since the Great Depression. Now that the old enemy, stagflation, is stirring once more, the lessons Stephen Axilrod draws from past battles couldn't be timelier. --Sylvia Nasar, author of A Beautiful Mind Stephen Axilrod's aptly titled book is, indeed, the ultimate Federal Reserve insider's account. Leaving aside only the chairmen under whom he served, no one played a greater role in shaping U.S. monetary policy during these turbulent years or had a closer view of how the policy was made. And, true to the author, Axilrod's book is full of plain common sense about central banking, economic policy, and much beyond. No one seriously interested in American monetary policy in the post-World War II era can ignore what Axilrod recounts here. --Benjamin M. Friedman, William Joseph Maier Professor of Political Economy, Harvard University

Author Information

Stephen H. Axilrod worked from 1952 to 1986 at the Board of Governors of the Federal Reserve System in Washington, D.C., rising to Staff Director for Monetary and Financial Policy and Staff Director and Secretary of the Federal Open Market Committee, the Fedis main monetary policy arm. Since 1986 he has worked in private markets and as a consultant on monetary policy with foreign monetary authorities.

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