Fed Up by Danielle DiMartino Booth

When the economy crashed in 2008, few people were in a better position than Danielle DiMartino Booth to witness the crisis as it unfolded. At the Dallas Fed, she’d been sidelined for years for warning that housing was in a bubble. That changed very quickly when Lehman Brothers collapsed, and from 2009 to 2015, she became the eyes and ears for Richard Fisher, on of the most important dissenting voices within the Fed.

As Bernanke and Yellen flooded the market with helicopter money, massacred savers and pension funds with a decade of zero percent interest rates, exploded the Fed’s balance sheet to the tune of trillions, and dragged the US economy through one of the worst “recovery” periods in history, Danielle was there, right in the thick of it. And now, she’s written a book to explain what the hell happened—and what happens next.

This was the first in-depth financial book I’ve read. It did not disappoint. Danielle’s writing has a sarcastic and witty edge that is both insightful and incisive. She has the enviable ability to take dry technical analysis and make it entertaining.

At the same time, this is not a lightweight book. To someone who is unfamiliar with the financial world and is still confused by things like the subprime mortgage crisis or the housing collapse, this is not a good entry point (for that, I’d suggest The Big Short).

However, for someone with some passing familiarity on the subject, who understands the basics of finance and the Federal Reserve, and has a growing sense that something, somewhere, is very very wrong in our economy, this book is fantastic.

I’m not in total agreement with Mrs. Booth. The most pertinent point of disagreement was probably this:

Though [Ron] Paul made some good points [with his book End the Fed], America is not a banana republic. It needs a strong and independent central bank.

A country that grants a quasi-government entity a monopoly on the right to counterfeit money is much closer to a banana republic than the likes of the Roman Empire, which endured for one and a half millennia because their monetary system was anchored to gold. But if I only read books or listened to sources that I always agreed with, I would be locking myself in an intellectual prison of my own making.

Towards that end, Danielle DiMartino Booth offers a fascinating and unique perspective that I’ve found to be invaluable. If, like me, you feel that something is deeply wrong in our economy and want to know what it is, or if you believe that we’re on the verge of another economic collapse and want to educate yourself on the things that are driving it, I highly recommend this book.

Also, she posts a regular column on her site! Check it out!