A sober but not dismal account of what’s been happening to our pocketbooks. Readers who wonder why raising the interest rate...
Former Federal Reserve chair Bernanke (The Federal Reserve and the Financial Crisis, 2013) offers a view from the trenches of the Great Recession and its aftermath.
A framing figure in this lucid memoir, appearing early and late, is Alan Greenspan, Bernanke’s predecessor, who, it seems, saw trouble coming and did not act decisively. Bernanke cites Greenspan’s reluctance to subject whole categories of financial practices relating to mortgages to federal oversight, which opened the door to loopholes that contributed to the housing market collapse. “The hole in our logic,” writes Bernanke, “was that, as lending standards deteriorated, the exception became the rule.” Bernanke’s account of the Great Recession involves plenty of mea culpa pleading; he writes that in his time as a Fed governor leading up to his chairmanship, he and his fellow executives tended to underestimate the risks inherent in a loosely regulated market. He goes on to trace this fast-and-loose approach to legislative politics. For example, although Fannie Mae and Freddie Mac came close to catastrophic failure, congressional overseers were too enamored of the “ultimate free lunch” these agencies offered to pay much attention until it was almost too late. Bernanke, who has made news outside of but coincidental with this book by renouncing his former affiliation with the GOP, suggests that political gridlock has served as a tremendous brake on an economic recovery that should have been complete by now. The ongoing threat of government shutdown is an understandable deterrent to investment and consumer confidence. It helps to have wonky leanings to follow Bernanke’s arguments, which, though mostly nontechnical, can be a little daunting: “Futures markets gave us a reliable read of where markets thought the federal funds rate was going—but not for our securities purchases.”
A sober but not dismal account of what’s been happening to our pocketbooks. Readers who wonder why raising the interest rate is a big deal (and why not raising it may be a mistake) will find suggestive answers here.Pub Date: Oct. 5, 2015
ISBN: 978-0-393-24721-3
Page Count: 610
Publisher: Norton
Review Posted Online: Oct. 9, 2015
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The author's youthfulness helps to assure the inevitable comparison with the Anne Frank diary although over and above the...
Elie Wiesel spent his early years in a small Transylvanian town as one of four children.
He was the only one of the family to survive what Francois Maurois, in his introduction, calls the "human holocaust" of the persecution of the Jews, which began with the restrictions, the singularization of the yellow star, the enclosure within the ghetto, and went on to the mass deportations to the ovens of Auschwitz and Buchenwald. There are unforgettable and horrifying scenes here in this spare and sombre memoir of this experience of the hanging of a child, of his first farewell with his father who leaves him an inheritance of a knife and a spoon, and of his last goodbye at Buchenwald his father's corpse is already cold let alone the long months of survival under unconscionable conditions.
Pub Date: Jan. 16, 2006
ISBN: 0374500010
Page Count: 120
Publisher: Hill & Wang
Review Posted Online: Oct. 7, 2011
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Jan. 15, 2006
A standout immigrant coming-of-age story.
In her first nonfiction book, novelist Grande (Dancing with Butterflies, 2009, etc.) delves into her family’s cycle of separation and reunification.
Raised in poverty so severe that spaghetti reminded her of the tapeworms endemic to children in her Mexican hometown, the author is her family’s only college graduate and writer, whose honors include an American Book Award and International Latino Book Award. Though she was too young to remember her father when he entered the United States illegally seeking money to improve life for his family, she idolized him from afar. However, she also blamed him for taking away her mother after he sent for her when the author was not yet 5 years old. Though she emulated her sister, she ultimately answered to herself, and both siblings constantly sought affirmation of their parents’ love, whether they were present or not. When one caused disappointment, the siblings focused their hopes on the other. These contradictions prove to be the narrator’s hallmarks, as she consistently displays a fierce willingness to ask tough questions, accept startling answers, and candidly render emotional and physical violence. Even as a girl, Grande understood the redemptive power of language to define—in the U.S., her name’s literal translation, “big queen,” led to ridicule from other children—and to complicate. In spelling class, when a teacher used the sentence “my mamá loves me” (mi mamá me ama), Grande decided to “rearrange the words so that they formed a question: ¿Me ama mi mamá? Does my mama love me?”
A standout immigrant coming-of-age story.Pub Date: Aug. 28, 2012
ISBN: 978-1-4516-6177-4
Page Count: 320
Publisher: Atria
Review Posted Online: June 11, 2012
Kirkus Reviews Issue: July 1, 2012
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