Profiles

James Grant proposes that the last time US government did not prescribe the now standard cure for economic slumps consisting of fiscal stimulus and easy money was the downturn of 1920–1921. Grant’s purpose is to test the efficacy of this medicine by checking what happened when it was not...

Volume 17, No. 4 (Winter 2014) Eswar S. Prasad Princeton: Princeton University Press, 2014, 432 pages The great mystery of international finance is how the U.S. dollar has managed to retain its dominance. This is a currency, after all, that has lost about 83 percent of its purchasing power since...

Abstract: Since the financial crisis first erupted in the summer of 2007, the US Federal Reserve has sought to contain negative spillovers into the real economy by dramatically loosening monetary policy. Initially, this was done by lowering its key lending rates, but as the crisis has worsened, and...

The strangest thing about the ongoing financial crisis is that US Fed Chairman Ben Bernanke has so far come out of it relatively unscathed.