By Christopher Leonard
New York: Simon and Schuster, 2022.
Pp. viii, 373, $30 hardcover.
Author Christopher Leonard is a journalist, not an economist. Not surprisingly, the value of lies mostly in its behind-the-scenes accounts of how monetary policy was made over the last twelve years and not in its layman’s theory of how the macroeconomy works or in its narrative macroeconomic history. Nonetheless, from talking to practitioners, Leonard has gotten hold of an important insight. Artificially cheap credit has encouraged and financed unsustainable investment booms: “Asset inflation was the force behind the dot-com crash of 2000, the housing market crash of 2008, and the unprecedented market crash of 2020 … The Federal Reserve can stoke asset inflation when it keeps money too cheap for too long” (p. 54). Leonard draws no direct inspiration from Austrian business cycle theory, and indirectly indicates that his own political views are those of a New
