21st Century Monetary Policy

21st Century Monetary Policy takes readers inside the Federal Reserve, explaining what it does and why.

In response to the COVID-19 pandemic, the Federal Reserve deployed an extraordinary range of policy tools that helped prevent the collapse of the financial system and the U.S. economy. Chair Jerome Powell and his colleagues lent directly to U.S. businesses, purchased trillions of dollars of government securities, pumped dollars into the international financial system, and crafted a new framework for monetary policy that emphasized job creation.

These strategies would have astonished Powell's late-20th-century predecessors, from William McChesney Martin to Alan Greenspan, and the advent of these tools raises new questions about the future landscape of economic policy.

In 21st Century Monetary Policy, Ben S. Bernanke—former chair of the Federal Reserve and one of the world's leading economists—explains the Fed's evolution and...