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21ST CENTURY MONETARY POLICY

THE FEDERAL RESERVE FROM THE GREAT INFLATION TO COVID-19

A clear explication of how money flows from the nation’s central banking system into the larger economy.

The former chair of the Federal Reserve examines how and why that organization works to control financial crises.

There is a large distinction between monetary policy, which concerns how targeted money can be used to strengthen an economy generally, and fiscal policy, which concerns where funds are spent—for example, the CARES Act promulgated during the pandemic to fund public health measures but also to support workers and businesses most harmed by the crisis. “Unlike monetary policy,” writes Bernanke, “which can be adjusted quickly as needed, government spending and tax policies are not as easy to change.” The Fed has considerably more leverage in applying money as a tool for economic stimulus and relief—though, the author points out, there is a large political dimension to that enterprise. For example, the Trump administration was markedly hostile to the use of the strategy called quantitative easing, or flooding sectors of the economy with money in order to keep lines of credit open to businesses and local governments. “The most basic requirement for economic efficiency is that the economy’s resources, including the labor force, be fully employed,” writes Bernanke, noting the challenges that occurred when the 2008 fiscal crisis sent unemployment skyrocketing—among them the challenge of inflation, about which the Fed must strike a delicate balance between too much and too little. “Monetary policies that promote economic recovery have broad benefits,” writes the author, and can also help curtail inequality. One strategy involves raising tax rates on capital gains, always unpopular among the millionaires in Congress. While the Fed can’t control the course of a pandemic, it can certainly respond nimbly to “economic trauma.” One doesn’t need a strong background in economics to follow Bernanke’s arguments, but such a background certainly helps.

A clear explication of how money flows from the nation’s central banking system into the larger economy.

Pub Date: May 17, 2022

ISBN: 978-1-324-02046-2

Page Count: 496

Publisher: Norton

Review Posted Online: March 6, 2022

Kirkus Reviews Issue: April 1, 2022

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A PEOPLE'S HISTORY OF THE UNITED STATES

For Howard Zinn, long-time civil rights and anti-war activist, history and ideology have a lot in common. Since he thinks that everything is in someone's interest, the historian—Zinn posits—has to figure out whose interests he or she is defining/defending/reconstructing (hence one of his previous books, The Politics of History). Zinn has no doubts about where he stands in this "people's history": "it is a history disrespectful of governments and respectful of people's movements of resistance." So what we get here, instead of the usual survey of wars, presidents, and institutions, is a survey of the usual rebellions, strikes, and protest movements. Zinn starts out by depicting the arrival of Columbus in North America from the standpoint of the Indians (which amounts to their standpoint as constructed from the observations of the Europeans); and, after easily establishing the cultural disharmony that ensued, he goes on to the importation of slaves into the colonies. Add the laborers and indentured servants that followed, plus women and later immigrants, and you have Zinn's amorphous constituency. To hear Zinn tell it, all anyone did in America at any time was to oppress or be oppressed; and so he obscures as much as his hated mainstream historical foes do—only in Zinn's case there is that absurd presumption that virtually everything that came to pass was the work of ruling-class planning: this amounts to one great indictment for conspiracy. Despite surface similarities, this is not a social history, since we get no sense of the fabric of life. Instead of negating the one-sided histories he detests, Zinn has merely reversed the image; the distortion remains.

Pub Date: Jan. 1, 1979

ISBN: 0061965588

Page Count: 772

Publisher: Harper & Row

Review Posted Online: May 26, 2012

Kirkus Reviews Issue: Jan. 1, 1979

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WHEN BREATH BECOMES AIR

A moving meditation on mortality by a gifted writer whose dual perspectives of physician and patient provide a singular...

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A neurosurgeon with a passion for literature tragically finds his perfect subject after his diagnosis of terminal lung cancer.

Writing isn’t brain surgery, but it’s rare when someone adept at the latter is also so accomplished at the former. Searching for meaning and purpose in his life, Kalanithi pursued a doctorate in literature and had felt certain that he wouldn’t enter the field of medicine, in which his father and other members of his family excelled. “But I couldn’t let go of the question,” he writes, after realizing that his goals “didn’t quite fit in an English department.” “Where did biology, morality, literature and philosophy intersect?” So he decided to set aside his doctoral dissertation and belatedly prepare for medical school, which “would allow me a chance to find answers that are not in books, to find a different sort of sublime, to forge relationships with the suffering, and to keep following the question of what makes human life meaningful, even in the face of death and decay.” The author’s empathy undoubtedly made him an exceptional doctor, and the precision of his prose—as well as the moral purpose underscoring it—suggests that he could have written a good book on any subject he chose. Part of what makes this book so essential is the fact that it was written under a death sentence following the diagnosis that upended his life, just as he was preparing to end his residency and attract offers at the top of his profession. Kalanithi learned he might have 10 years to live or perhaps five. Should he return to neurosurgery (he could and did), or should he write (he also did)? Should he and his wife have a baby? They did, eight months before he died, which was less than two years after the original diagnosis. “The fact of death is unsettling,” he understates. “Yet there is no other way to live.”

A moving meditation on mortality by a gifted writer whose dual perspectives of physician and patient provide a singular clarity.

Pub Date: Jan. 19, 2016

ISBN: 978-0-8129-8840-6

Page Count: 248

Publisher: Random House

Review Posted Online: Sept. 29, 2015

Kirkus Reviews Issue: Oct. 15, 2015

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