In Fed We Trust

1975 Words8 Pages
In fed we trust book report essay In Fed We Trust, by David Wessel, goes over the hard decisions and the order of events that caused the Great Panic. To prevent a possible second Great Depression, Ben Bernanke, a scholar of the Great Depression was called in to save the day. Bernanke swore to do everything in his power to keep the economy afloat, which entitled keeping the big businesses from going under. Some of the key players in this book were Henry Paulson, who was the Secretary of Treasury under the Bush Administration, previously stated Ben Bernanke and his other colleagues who were Don Kohn, Tim Geithner, and Kevin Warsh. These last stated four men were also known as the "four musketeers." The "four musketeers" threatened what we know as a free market capitalist system. With the tremendous power and independence the Federal Reserve shows from In Fed We Trust, the situation of the Great Panic and how they dealt with it is very debatable. The Fed had to try to get the economy back to stable conditions by any means possible and could do this by just creating money from nothing. In Fed We Trust demonstrates the challenges the American Society were faced with in dealing with this economic crisis different from any other, how monetary policy was transformed, and how the Fed converted from Greenspan to un-Greenspan. Throughout the Great Panic the Federal Reserve tried to bail out big companies that were going under, and the Fed became known as the "lender of last resort." The Lehman Brothers were going under and the fed had a difficult time trying to help them out. The Fed and Paulson tried to find a company to buy out the Lehman Brothers and found a bank in Britain called Barclays. The British Financial Services Authority wouldn't allow Barclay to purchase Lehman which resulted in the company failing because the Fed didn't have a backup plan if this deal didn't go
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