Inside the Fed

Monetary Policy and Its Management, Martin through Greenspan to Bernanke

Stephen H. Axilrod

Narrated by Neal Vickers

Available from Audible

Book published by The MIT Press

Stephen Axilrod is the ultimate Federal Reserve insider. He worked at the Fed’s Board of Governors for more than thirty years and after that in private markets and as a consultant on monetary policy. With Inside the Fed, he offers his unique perspective on the inner workings of the Federal Reserve System during the last fifty years. This new, post-financial meltdown edition offers his assessment of the Fed’s action (and inaction) during the crisis and expanded coverage of the Fed in the Bernanke era.

Great leadership in monetary policy, Axilrod says, is determined not by pure economic sophistication but by the ability to push through political and social barriers to achieve a paradigm shift in policy—and by the courage and bureaucratic moxie to pull it off.

Stephen H. Axilrod worked from 1952 to 1986 at the Board of Governors of the Federal Reserve System in Washington, D.C., rising to Staff Director for Monetary and Financial Policy and Staff Director and Secretary of the Federal Open Market Committee, the Fed’s main monetary policy arm. Since 1986 he has worked in private markets and as a consultant on monetary policy with foreign monetary authorities. He is the author of The Federal Reserve: What Everyone Needs to Know.

REVIEWS:

“Axilrod, a longtime Federal Reserve System veteran, provides an insider's perspective on how the Fed has evolved over the past 50 years. Revealing the impact of personalities and their responses to political, social and bureaucratic situations, he explores such key topics such as money supply vs. interest rates, monetary base and reserve aggregates vs. money-market conditions, and increased emphasis on real-world variables rather than on monetary variables as indicators and guides for policy. The book is based mostly on anecdotal recollections of personal interactions with central bank leaders and others as they managed policy discussions and implementation. Despite the involvement of other influential parties, Axilrod's view is that chairmen took the lead in policy formation but had limited influence on the day-to-day operating targets. He also offers his thoughts on the future of the organization, noting that leaders will need to take a more direct account of international markets in making judgments about policy and its management. Informative and insightful, this view of the inner workings of the Fed will appeal to anyone with an interest in economics or curious about the organization's recent progression.”

—Publishers Weekly

“An intimate account of the Fed's depressing decline in the Seventies and dramatic comeback in the Volcker years when the central bank triumphed over the biggest threat to the US economy since the Great Depression. Now that the old enemy, stagflation, is stirring once more, the lessons Stephen Axilrod draws from past battles couldn't be timelier.”

—Sylvia Nasar, author of A Beautiful Mind

“This book is truly from 'inside the Fed'...Axilrod's accounts of policymaking as seen from inside the Fed are interesting and informative.”

—John H. Wood, EH.Net

“Informative and insightful, this view of the inner workings of the Fed will appeal to anyone with an interest in economics or curious about the organization's recent progression.”

— Publishers Weekly