num_pages: 352
description: The inside story told with insight perspective and stellar reporting of how an unassuming civil servant created trillions of dollars from thin air combatted a public health crisis and saved the American economy from a second Great Depression (Alan S. Blinder former Vice Chair of the Federal Reserve).By February 2020 the U.S. economic expansion had become the longest on record. Unemployment was plumbing half-century lows. Stock markets soared to new highs. One month later the public health battle against a deadly virus had pushed the economy into the equivalent of a medically induced coma. Americas workplacesoffices shops malls and factoriesshuttered. Many of the nations largest employers and tens of thousands of small businesses faced ruin. Over 22 million American jobs were lost. The extreme uncertainty led to some of the largest daily drops ever in the stock market.Nick Timiraos the Wall Street Journals chief economics correspondent draws on extensive interviews to detail the tense meetings late night phone calls and crucial video conferences behind the largest swiftest U.S. economic policy response since World War II. Trillion Dollar Triage goes inside the Federal Reserve one of the countrys most important and least understood institutions to chronicle how its plainspoken chairman Jay Powell unleashed an unprecedented monetary barrage to keep the economy on life support. With the bleeding stemmed the Fed faced a new challenge: How to nurture a recovery without unleashing an inflation-fueling bubble-blowing money bomb?Trillion Dollar Triage is the definitive gripping history of a creative and unprecedented battle to shield the American economy from the twin threats of a public health disaster and economic crisis. Economic theory and policy will never be the same.
language: English
title: Trillion Dollar Triage: How Jay Powell and the Fed Battled a President and a Pandemic---and Prevented Economic Disaster
publisher: Little, Brown and Company