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The Courage to Act: A Memoir of a Crisis and Its Aftermath Ben S. Bernanke W. W. Norton & Company, 2015
Each of these leading figures during the Great Recession has published a memoir reviewed in this journal.7 With Ben Bernanke's The Courage to Act, we are now able to review the one memoir that has been needed to complete the circle. Bernanke served as Federal Reserve chairman from February 2006 to January 2014, a period that spanned the year and a half preceding the crisis and approximately six and a half years after it started.
A caution: our criticisms should not be taken to obscure the fact that Bernanke is a brilliant and accomplished man. Born in 1953, he achieved academic excellence at Harvard University and the Massachusetts Institute of Technology (MIT). He served six years as the chair of the economics department at Princeton University, and was editor of the American Economic Review. His appointment to the Federal Reserve Board in 2002 was followed by his eight-year service as its chairman. To recite these things is merely to give the highlights of an impressive record.
His memoirs provide a chronological narrative of his life, with emphasis on his and the Federal Reserve's role during the tumultuous years of the financial crisis. The narrative contains much discussion of policy issues, although a serious student of those issues will wish there were more. In War and Peace, Leo Tolstoy took off from his story-telling to include long essays on the philosophy of history. Something akin to that, placed perhaps in appendices, would be most welcome here. Just the same, an editor would not be unreasonable in thinking it best to make two books out of it: the present personal narrative, and a follow-up book for that deeper analysis.
We will give a chronology of the financial crisis and of the steps taken to combat it. Although that is valuable in itself, as well as illustrating the book's vast information-content, we will give a more prominent place to a critical examination of Bernanke's thinking by placing it near the beginning of this review.
Some important observations
While at MIT, Bernanke found Milton Friedman and Anna Schwartz's A Monetary History of the United States fascinating, and "became...