NR PLUS
Magazine September 7, 2009, Issue

Bernanke’s War

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In Fed We Trust: Ben Bernanke’s War on the Great Panic: How the Federal Reserve Became the Fourth Branch of Government, by David Wessel (Crown, 323 pp., $26.99)

David Wessel’s new volume on the Federal Reserve’s response to the financial crisis is the sort of book that Bob Woodward usually writes about U.S. presidents: a character-driven, sometimes novelistic, You Are There account of highly driven, high-performing, high-testosterone men who stay up late eating ham sandwiches during world-shaking crises. It analyzes the choices they made and the creeds that led them to those choices. 

At the heart of this story are the “Four Musketeers,” Federal Reserve chairman Ben Bernanke and his three-man brain trust: Kevin Warsh, the wunderkind investment banker who was the youngest Fed governor in history; Treasury veteran …

In This Issue

Articles

Politics & Policy

Direction, Anyone?

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Republicans are looking for a leader. Go to any right-leaning gathering, and at some point the conversation will turn to the party’s potential presidential nominee in 2012. Republicans were less ...
Politics & Policy

Blue Dog Blues

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Honesdale, Pa. – If you want to understand better why President Obama’s heath-care agenda has foundered, consider the story of Rep. Christopher Carney, a Democrat who represents the district that includes ...
Politics & Policy

A Matter of Scale

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A common liberal talking point is that, based on the historical record, reducing greenhouse gases should be fairly easy. After all, acid rain was once a terrible problem, but government ...
Politics & Policy

Hillary’s Innocence Abroad

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Hillary Clinton’s eleven-day trip through Africa was an odd affair. The proximate reason for it was that Obama’s election awakened wholly unrealistic expectations throughout Africa that the new president would ...
Politics & Policy

Bear Right

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Clad in a black jacket over an open-necked black shirt, speaking directly into the camera against the backdrop of a summer coastline, Russian president Dmitry Medvedev looked every inch the ...
Politics & Policy

Town Hall Summer

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The Chinese go nuts once every 50 years or so. The last time was around 1966, when the country erupted into something called the Cultural Revolution, and leading political and ...

Features

Politics & Policy

Rubio Rising

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Florida governor Charlie Crist is running for the Senate, and he isn’t supposed to lose — let alone lose in the Republican primary. He enjoys a high approval rating, has ...
Politics & Policy

Why the Stimulus Failed

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Conservatives have correctly declared President Obama’s $787 billion “stimulus” a flop. In a January report, White House economists predicted the bill would create (not merely save) 3.3 million jobs. Since ...

Books, Arts & Manners

Politics & Policy

Bernanke’s War

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David Wessel’s new volume on the Federal Reserve’s response to the financial crisis is the sort of book that Bob Woodward usually writes about U.S. presidents: a character-driven, sometimes novelistic, ...
Politics & Policy

This Is How It Flops

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Grant Ginder’s lightly satirical novel about the young, wealthy political set in Washington, D.C., is a shallow, clichéd, and not particularly likable book about shallow, clichéd, and not particularly likable ...
Politics & Policy

Film: Inner Space

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The next time you read about the money that’s been poured away bringing some lame, unnecessary science-fiction spectacular to life — the $200 million that Michael Bay spent making the ...

Sections

Politics & Policy

Letters

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Defining ‘Conservative’ For the most part I agree with Tod Lindberg’s review of The Conservatives, by Patrick Allitt (“The Deepest Roots,” August 10), and I certainly look forward to reading the ...
Politics & Policy

The Week

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‐ New left-wing slogan: Dissent is the highest form of tastelessness. ‐ Congressmen’s town-hall meetings on the president’s health-care plan have caused a backlash of un-American fury. It comes from liberals, ...
Happy Warrior

Sharia in New Haven

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Whenever I write about Europe and demography, I get a lot of mail on the general line of “Oh yeah, Steyn? When will Muslims be 50.01 percent of the population ...