The best book on the Fed in our time and a model of financial writing.
A wide-ranging study of the Federal Reserve and its almost unrestricted power over the U.S. economy.
“The Fed plays a quiet but critical part in shaping our everyday lives,” writes New York Times financial journalist Smialek in this surprisingly—given its subject—readable account. To fulfill its mission of controlling inflation and employment levels, it essentially has the power to print money without much in the way of oversight. For example, “during the 2008 financial crisis, chair Ben Bernanke unilaterally approved a $600 billion bond-buying program to shore up crumbling markets.” This independence has made the Fed “the most powerful economic institution the modern world has ever known.” It has also come with the understanding that the Fed is apolitical, as Donald Trump discovered when he attempted to bend the institution and its head, Jerome Powell, to his will to make him look good during the economic implosion of 2020. The pandemic figures heavily in Smialek’s detailed, cogent account, as the author illustrates how the bankers and economists who run the Fed are quick to abandon ideology and theory for practical solutions to the problems they face. Some of the Fed’s governors tend to free market fundamentalism, but when faced with crisis, they allow for quantitative easing to increase the liquidity of banks. During the pandemic, the Fed reduced interest rates to zero and allowed foreign banks easier access to dollars in a package indicating that “the Fed was trying to say that it would do whatever it took to restore markets to normality.” In 2021, the Fed’s strategies kept the global economy from collapsing, “demonstrating that the Fed’s powers could be wielded to address more of society’s challenges than anyone had previously imagined.” Today, as Smialek lays out in accessible prose, the Fed has a new battle to fight in attempting to curb inflation, which may bring about “another Fed evolution” in policy and practice.
The best book on the Fed in our time and a model of financial writing.Pub Date: Feb. 28, 2023
ISBN: 9780593320235
Page Count: 384
Publisher: Knopf
Review Posted Online: Dec. 13, 2022
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Jan. 1, 2023
Striking research showing the immense complexity of ordinary thought and revealing the identities of the gatekeepers in our...
A psychologist and Nobel Prize winner summarizes and synthesizes the recent decades of research on intuition and systematic thinking.
The author of several scholarly texts, Kahneman (Emeritus Psychology and Public Affairs/Princeton Univ.) now offers general readers not just the findings of psychological research but also a better understanding of how research questions arise and how scholars systematically frame and answer them. He begins with the distinction between System 1 and System 2 mental operations, the former referring to quick, automatic thought, the latter to more effortful, overt thinking. We rely heavily, writes, on System 1, resorting to the higher-energy System 2 only when we need or want to. Kahneman continually refers to System 2 as “lazy”: We don’t want to think rigorously about something. The author then explores the nuances of our two-system minds, showing how they perform in various situations. Psychological experiments have repeatedly revealed that our intuitions are generally wrong, that our assessments are based on biases and that our System 1 hates doubt and despises ambiguity. Kahneman largely avoids jargon; when he does use some (“heuristics,” for example), he argues that such terms really ought to join our everyday vocabulary. He reviews many fundamental concepts in psychology and statistics (regression to the mean, the narrative fallacy, the optimistic bias), showing how they relate to his overall concerns about how we think and why we make the decisions that we do. Some of the later chapters (dealing with risk-taking and statistics and probabilities) are denser than others (some readers may resent such demands on System 2!), but the passages that deal with the economic and political implications of the research are gripping.
Striking research showing the immense complexity of ordinary thought and revealing the identities of the gatekeepers in our minds.Pub Date: Nov. 1, 2011
ISBN: 978-0-374-27563-1
Page Count: 512
Publisher: Farrar, Straus and Giroux
Review Posted Online: Sept. 3, 2011
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Sept. 15, 2011
BOOK REVIEW
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A passionate and accessible guide to humanizing the workplace.
Helbig and Norman present a game plan for making leadership more responsively human.
In this expanded update to The Psychological Safety Playbook: Lead More Powerfully by Being More Human (2023), the authors provide “practical strategies for responding to resistance, sparking change, embodying the change we want to see, and moving forward deliberately,” specifically in a business setting. They suggest ways to encourage what they call “changemakers” through the use of five key “plays” from their playbook: Communicate Courageously, Master the Art of Listening, Manage Your Reactions (“shift from automatic reaction to conscious response to stay better connected to yourself and others”), Embrace Risk and Failure, and Design Inclusive Rituals. The goal is to ensure that organizational cultures promote psychological safety, guided by leaders who “walk the talk” by emphasizing their own humanity at every turn. (“We must be the first to share our own failures with our teams, which will start to make it possible for others to do the same.”) This call for example-setting is sounded throughout the book as Helbig and Norman urge their target audience (leaders and would-be leaders) to go beyond mere instruction and instead embody the qualities they want to see in their subordinates, such as continuous learning, active curiosity, and self-reflection. Each chapter includes a detailed “Recommended Reading” section and text with extensive numbered and bulleted points formatted to make the core concepts more immediately digestible. The authors effectively employ clear and empathetic prose to assure readers that psychological safety is slow to build and quick to break, observing that such safety requires steady attention and delivers outsize payoffs as a result. They refreshingly ground a great deal of the material in psychology and neuroscience, pointing out, for instance, that research has demonstrated that the parasympathetic nervous system responds to honest appreciation, which improves creative thinking. Some wistful readers might consider some of the authors’ suggestions beyond the reach of their own organizations, as when group facilitators are advised to “gently intervene when someone dominates the conversation,” but hope springs eternal.
A passionate and accessible guide to humanizing the workplace.Pub Date: May 19, 2026
ISBN: 9798993550503
Page Count: 170
Publisher: Crazy Idea Press
Review Posted Online: April 23, 2026
Review Program: Kirkus Indie
BOOK REVIEW
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