num_pages: 203
description: Stephen Axilrod is the ultimate Federal Reserve insider. He worked at theFed's Board of Governors for over thirty years and after that in private markets andas a consultant on monetary policy. With Inside the Fed he offers his uniqueperspective on the inner workings of the Federal Reserve System during the lastfifty years -- writing about personalities as much as policy -- based on hisknowledge and observations of every Fed chairman since 1951.Axilrod's discussionfocuses on how the personalities of the various chairmen affected their capacity forleadership. He describes for example Arthur Burns's response to political pressurefrom the Nixon White House and Paul Volcker's radical shift to an anti-inflationarypolicy at the end of the 1970s -- a transition in which Axilrod himself played acrucial role. As for the Greenspan years Axilrod points to the unintended effectsof the Fed's newfound garrulousness (the plethora of announcements and hints aboutpolicy intentions) -- one of which was the Fed's loss of credibility in theaftermath of the chairman's 1996 comment about irrational exuberance. And Axilrodincisively outlines the problems -- including the subprime mess -- inherited fromGreenspan by the current chairman Ben Bernanke. Great leadership in monetarypolicy Axilrod says is determined not by pure economic sophistication but by theability to push through political and social barriers to achieve a paradigm shift inpolicy -- and by the courage and bureaucratic moxie to pull it off.
language: English
title: Inside the Fed: Monetary Policy and Its Management, Martin Through Greenspan to Bernanke
publisher: MIT Press (MA)