The Lords of Easy Money By Christopher Leonard
- Narrated by: Jacques Roy
- Length: 10 hrs and 19 mins
- Release date: 01-11-22
The Lords of Easy Money AudioBook Summary
The New York Times best-selling business journalist Christopher Leonard infiltrates one of America’s most mysterious institutions – the Federal Reserve – to show how its policies spearheaded by Chairman Jerome Powell over the past 10 years have accelerated income inequality and put our country’s economic stability at risk.
If you asked most people what forces led to today’s unprecedented income inequality and financial crashes, no one would say the Federal Reserve. For most of its history, the Fed has enjoyed the fawning adoration of the press. When the economy grew, it was credited to the Fed. When the economy imploded in 2008, the Fed got credit for rescuing us.
But the Fed also has a unique power to reshape the American economy for the worse, which it did, fatefully, on November 4, 2010 through a radical intervention called quantitative easing. In just a few short years, the Fed more than quadrupled the money supply with one goal: to encourage banks and other investors to extend more risky debt. Leaders at the Fed knew that they were undertaking a bold experiment that would produce few real jobs, with long-term risks that were hard to measure. But the Fed proceeded anyway…and then found itself trapped. Once it printed all that money, there was no way to withdraw it from circulation. The Fed tried several times, only to see markets start to crash, at which point the Fed turned the money spigot back on. That’s what it did when COVID hit, printing 300 years’ worth of money in two short months.
