Trillion Dollar Triage How Jay Powell and the Fed Battled a President and a Pandemic---and Prevented Economic Disaster

by Timiraos, Nick

• ISBN13: 9780316272810
• ISBN10: 0316272817
• eBook ISBN(s): 9780316273077
• Format: Hardcover
• Copyright: 2022-03-01
• Publisher: Little, Brown and Company
• More Book Details

Summary

The inside story, told with “insight, perspective, and stellar reporting,” of how an unassuming civil servant created trillions of dollars from thin air, combatted a public health crisis, and saved the American economy from a second Great Depression (Alan S. Blinder, former Vice Chair of the Federal Reserve).

By February 2020, the U.S. economic expansion had become the longest on record. Unemployment was plumbing half-century lows. Stock markets soared to new highs. One month later, the public health battle against a deadly virus had pushed the economy into the equivalent of a medically induced coma. America’s workplaces—offices, shops, malls, and factories—shuttered. Many of the nation’s largest employers and tens of thousands of small businesses faced ruin. Over 22 million American jobs were lost. The extreme uncertainty led to some of the largest daily drops ever in the stock market.

Nick Timiraos, the Wall Street Journal’s chief economics correspondent, draws on extensive interviews to detail the tense meetings, late night phone calls, and crucial video conferences behind the largest, swiftest U.S. economic policy response since World War II. Trillion Dollar Triage goes inside the Federal Reserve, one of the country’s most important and least understood institutions, to chronicle how its plainspoken chairman, Jay Powell, unleashed an unprecedented monetary barrage to keep the economy on life support. With the bleeding stemmed, the Fed faced a new challenge: How to nurture a recovery without unleashing an inflation-fueling, bubble-blowing money bomb?

Trillion Dollar Triage is the definitive, gripping history of a creative and unprecedented battle to shield the American economy from the twin threats of a public health disaster and economic crisis. Economic theory and policy will never be the same.

Author Biography

Nick Timiraos has been The Wall Street Journal’s chief Fed scribe for the last three years, a period that spans all of Powell’s term in office and makes him uniquely positioned to tell this story now. His storytelling perch is one of the paper’s highest profile assignments, and traders pay close attention to his work given his authoritative reporting and excellent access to key players at the Fed, the 12 reserve banks in its system, and across Wall Street. He also maintains close contacts with sources at the White House, Treasury Department and executive branch agencies. Nick has been at the Journal for 14 years, first in New York and now in Washington.