Product Details

• Amazon Sales Rank: #151061 in Books
• Published on: 2004-01-05
• Original language: English
• Number of items: 1
• Binding: Paperback
• 320 pages

Customer Reviews

What can I say?
There is no way that I can criticize this book. Bernanke is the Governor of the Federal Reserve and I am not, which there are good reasons for.

However, this book is his PhD thesis on the Great Depression of 1929 - 1934. Hence it is written as such and is relatively theoretical. Personally, unless you have a university background in economics, I would skip this book.

If you are interested in economics, by all means do give it a go. The book is extremely interesting in as much as it attempts to explain the causes of the Great Depression. Most economists are taught, teach and write about equilibia. Bernanke has chosen to write about a disequilibrium, which is much more challenging and even more interesting.

Not for the layman
I bought this book in an attempt to balance up the various conspiracy theories currently surrounding the Federal Reserve. The reviewer above is quite right and although I'm fairly well read I found this to be extremely hard work. Unless you understand banker jargon you have to spend ages decoding each paragraph, sometimes each sentence, and in the end you aren't much wiser.
It's very hard for me to rate this book but I have only given it three stars because of sentences like the following one. 'Absent implausibly large differences in marginal spending propensities among the groups, it was suggested, pure redistributions should have no significant macro-economic effects.'
It took me about an hour to get that and I still don't think it is a correct sentence. There is no virtue in obscurity, unless of course you are a banker, as we now all realise.