Colluding with Central Banks, Not Russians.

• Author: McKinley, Vern

Collu$ion: How Central Bankers Rigged the World

By Nomi Prins

384 pp.; Nation Books, 2018

Three years ago, I reviewed Nomi Prins' last book, All the Presidents Bankers. (See "Finance According to Non-Academics," Spring 2015.) The book traced a century of connections between U.S. presidents and U.S. banks. As I explained it, the book's endnotes made clear that Prins relied on "a wide range of contemporary books, articles, and original documents drawn from the deep bowels of the archives of numerous presidents."

In her new book Collu$ion, she departs those dusty presidential archives for an around-the-world tour of many of the key global financial centers. According to her Author's Note:

To research this book, I set out on a global expedition. I visited Mexico City, Guadalajara, Monterrey, Rio de Janeiro, Sao Paulo, Brasilia, Porto Alegre, Beijing, Shanghai, Tokyo, London, Berlin and many cities throughout the United States.

As the book's subtitle makes clear, her focus is the world's central bankers and their method of creating money out of thin air. Throughout the book, she uses such verbs as "fabricated" and "conjured" to describe the many methods of creating money. No matter which descriptor she chooses or which global city she is talking about, the result is always the same:

Since the financial crisis, these illusionists have created money, altered the nature of the financial system, and orchestrated a de facto heist that enables the most powerful banks and central banks to run the world.... Much of the twentieth century belonged to Wall Street. The twenty-first century now belongs to the central banks.

Prins' approach / Her method for laying out the facts is relentless. Her formula is to choose five global economies: Mexico, Brazil, China, Japan, and Europe. She explains how the Fed conjured up money to prop up the banking system in the United States and then how, in rapid-fire succession, central bankers in each of the other economies responded to the Fed.

Prins tracks Mexico's two central bank governors during the crisis and summarizes their balancing act between looking inward to respond to domestic pressures and outward to coordinate interventions with the Fed. She explains how Guillermo Ortiz (late 1990s through the end of2009) and Agustin Carstens (2010 to 2017) "reacted in different ways to the push from the Fed and the pull from their country."

Ortiz cooperated with the Fed on issues like a $30 billion foreign currency swap line...