I’ve just read former Federal Reserve Chairman Ben Bernanke’s memoir - The Courage to Act - on the 2007-08 financial crisis. (I’m guessing that the title is a comment on Congress which, he thinks, did not have the courage to act.)
Bernanke helped save middle and low income Americans from a devastating slump, but the book is disappointing. It reads like a long press statement. It doesn’t reveal anything that hasn’t been said already, by him and others. And if you (wrongly) believed he did nothing to help ordinary Americans, and you have no sense of the counterfactual, what might have happened if he didn’t act, then this book is not going to change your mind.
I was hoping for a sense of the dynamics of the Federal Reserve. Why it behaves the way it does (including why the blind spots). I was hoping for more light on America’s atomized and dysfunctional financial system governance. And something revealing about what wiser behavior from legislators might have looked like.
He's reputably a very calm person and the only time he seems really worked up in the book is when he talks about members of Congress and the Senate. Echoing Churchill, and in the context of a farewell dinner for Tim Geithner that included recent Treasury Secretaries and Federal Reserve Governors (Rubin, Summers, Paulson, Volcker, and Greenspan) he noted, revealingly, that
“In some respects it was an awkward gathering, colored by complicated personal relationships, strong egos, differences in policy views – and a lot of history …[But] the deepest frustration we shared was with government dysfunction itself. The founders had designed a system to be deliberative, instead it was paralyzed. Too often the system promoted showboating, blind ideology, and malice. Nothing productive could be done it seemed, until all the wrong approaches were tried first. ”