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Three Central Bankers and a World on Fire
Penguin Press
April 2013
On Sale: April 4, 2013
400 pages
ISBN: 1594204624
EAN: 9781594204623
Kindle: B008EKOGKS
Hardcover / e-Book
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Non-Fiction
When the first fissures became visible to the naked eye in
August 2007, suddenly the most powerful men in the world
were three men who were never elected to public office. They
were the leaders of the world’s three most important central
banks: Ben Bernanke of the U.S. Federal Reserve, Mervyn King
of the Bank of England, and Jean-Claude Trichet of the
European Central Bank. Over the next five years, they and
their fellow central bankers deployed trillions of dollars,
pounds and euros to contain the waves of panic that
threatened to bring down the global financial system, moving
on a scale and with a speed that had no precedent.
Neil Irwin’s The Alchemists is a gripping
account of the most intense exercise in economic crisis
management we’ve ever seen, a poker game in which the stakes
have run into the trillions of dollars. The book begins in,
of all places, Stockholm, Sweden, in the seventeenth
century, where central banking had its rocky birth, and then
progresses through a brisk but dazzling tutorial on how the
central banker came to exert such vast influence over our
world, from its troubled beginnings to the Age of Greenspan,
bringing the reader into the present with a marvelous handle
on how these figures and institutions became what they are –
the possessors of extraordinary power over our collective
fate. What they chose to do with those powers is the
heart of the story Irwin tells.
Irwin
covered the Fed and other central banks from the earliest
days of the crisis for the Washington Post, enjoying
privileged access to leading central bankers and people
close to them. His account, based on reporting that took
place in 27 cities in 11 countries, is the holistic, truly
global story of the central bankers’ role in the world
economy we have been missing. It is a landmark
reckoning with central bankers and their power, with the
great financial crisis of our time, and with the history of
the relationship between capitalism and the state.
Definitive, revelatory, and riveting, The Alchemists
shows us where money comes from—and where it may well be going.
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