In this penetrating look inside the most powerful economic institution in the world, the Federal Reserve, David Wessel illuminates its opaque and undemocratic inner workings, while revealing how its chairman Ben Bernanke led the desperate effort to prevent the world's financial engine from grinding to a halt.

"Dr. Mohamed A. El-Erian, one of the world's most influential economic thinkers and the New York Times and Wall Street Journal bestselling author of When Markets Collide, has written a roadmap to what lies ahead and the decisions we must make now to stave off the next global economic and financial crisis. Our current economic path is coming to an end. The signposts are all around us: sluggish growth, rising inequality, stubbornly high pockets of unemployment,...

The former chairman of the Federal Reserve documents his rise from a Southern youth to Ivy League professorships prior to the 2007 housing bubble burst, detailing the dramatic efforts to salvage the U.S. economy that made him "Time" magazine's 2009 Person of the Year.

Chronicles the tumultuous era and remarkable personalities that created the Federal Reserve, tracing the financial panic and widespread distrust of bankers that prompted the landmark 1913 Federal Reserve Act and launched America's first steps onto the world financial stage.

"During the Global Financial Crisis in 2008, our financial infrastructure failed. Governments bailed out the very institutions that let the economy down. This episode spurred a serious rethink of our financial system. Does it make any sense that it takes two days to settle a stock transaction? Why do retailers, operating on razor thin margins, have to pay 3% for every customer credit card swipe? Why does it take two days to transfer money from a bank...

Explores the work of the world's most powerful central bankers-- --Ben Bernanke of the U.S. Federal Reserve, Mervyn King of the Bank of England, and Jean-Claude Trichet of the European Central Bank--offering a view from the cockpit of the global economy as the three men struggled to keep it from going down.

Perry Mehrling is professor of economics at Barnard College, Columbia University. He is the author of Fischer Black and the Revolutionary Idea of Finance and The Money Interest and the Public Interest: American Monetary Thought, 1920-1970. How the U.S. Federal Reserve began actively intervening in markets Walter Bagehot's Lombard Street, published in 1873 in the wake of a devastating London bank collapse, explained in clear and straightforward...