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Inside the Fed
Book

Inside the Fed

Monetary Policy and Its Management, Martin through Greenspan to Bernanke

Stephen H. Axilrod
MIT Press, 2009

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Editorial Rating

7

Qualities

  • Comprehensive
  • Innovative

Recommendation

Stephen H. Axilrod, a former top-level executive at the US Federal Reserve System, has written a dense first-hand report on the Fed’s inner workings and its policy development procedures. From the vantage point of his 30-year career at the Fed, he presents a detailed account of working closely with Fed chairmen William McChesney Martin, Arthur Burns, G. William Miller and Paul Volcker, along with astute observations about the tenures of Alan Greenspan and Ben Bernanke. Axilrod discusses how these distinct personalities tackled problems and made policy decisions. Given its slow pace and historical recollections about central bank operations – many of them inscrutable to the average reader – getAbstract recommends this look back to serious Fed observers who relish anecdotes about life inside the US central bank.

Take-Aways

  • The Federal Reserve Act created an independent central bank responsible to Congress.
  • Before inflation raged in the 1970s, the Fed and its chairmen received little attention.
  • While the media portray the chairman of the Fed as the US’s second most powerful person, the Fed’s Board of Governors wields the real policy-making clout.

About the Author

Stephen H. Axilrod rose to Staff Director for Monetary and Financial Policy, and Staff Director and Secretary of the Federal Open Market Committee, at the US Federal Reserve System. Since 1986, he has worked in the private sector.

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