Book
Reviews
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The Fed:
The Inside Story of How the World’s Most Powerful Financial Institution
Drives the Markets by Martin Mayer Recommendation: - - - (Take a pass) |
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Click on title or picture to buy from amazon.com |
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Nasty I’ve never liked Martin Mayer’s writing
much. Nothing in his latest book, The Fed,
changed my mind. Mayer epitomizes the Washington insider’s favorite
approaches: name-dropping; personal experiences trump facts; the world is
divided into the good and the bad and I’ll tell you which is which. Reading The Fed
will give you Mayer’s version of people and history, but don’t count on his
opinions becoming the authoritative ones. He’s often very mistaken, and
sloppy with facts. He recycles what others have said and tries to translate
it for a wide audience, punctuated with his own judgments, whether
well-informed or not. I can picture the deck of index cards Mayer used to
assemble this book: a thousand quotes, three or so to a page, interspersed
with his comments about the quotes. If Henry Mitchner is your idea of quality
fiction author, then Martin Mayer is the writer you’ll appreciate for a
financial story. This irritating and annoying book will
cause some people mentioned to wince. I know Preston Martin, whose name and
situation Mayer drops several times. I doubt that he’ll enjoy this depiction: “In early 1982,
Fred Schultz, a Florida banker, resigned as vice chairman of the Fed and
returned to his bank, and Reagan appointed to the post Preston Martin, a
tall, bony, cool drink of water from California, the former builder and
college professor who had been chairman of the Federal Home Loan Bank Board
in the first Nixon administration. On leaving the bank board, Pres had
founded a mortgage insurance company that he sold to Sears, and in 1981,
footloose and fancy free, he became a commissioner on the President’s
Commission on Housing. I was a commissioner too, and saw a fair amount of
Pres, who was a good ally to have when you agreed with him, a man of dry wit
and irreverent attitude if conventional views. He persuaded me, much against
my better judgment to vote with him in approving direct investments in real
estate by insured S&Ls, because I felt I didn’t know enough to refute his
argument that without a sizeable equity share in the enterprises to which it
lent money, an S&L could not survive in a world where interest rates were
on a roller-coaster. Pres left the Housing Commission in 1982, when Reagan
appointed him vice chairman of the Fed, and he assumed that he would succeed
Volcker when Volcker’s term expired the next year. As a housing man, he made
no bones of his belief that monetary policy was too tight, which endeared him
to the yahoos in the White House (and to William Greider, who made him a hero
in his book Secrets of the Temple), but added to the insiders’
perception that he lacked the gravitas for the chair.” My guess is that Pres concluded that Mayer
lacked gravitas and refused to suffer him gladly in their interactions. I
think Greider’s portrayal of Preston Martin matches the facts better than
Martin Mayer’s. Other minor errors that I noted in the text led me to
conclude that Mayer was sloppy, and didn’t receive knowledgable editing. The
attraction of an “insider story” is learning what really happened. This book
is a reminder that it all depends on who the insider is. The many pages of history in this book are
presented in a breezy approach that reminds the reader through every page
that Mayer is not a historian. I can’t think of a single reason to recommend
this book. Take a pass. Steve Hopkins, June 14, 2001 |
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ã 2001 Hopkins and Company, LLC |
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