Was It Really Triage?

• Author: McKinley, Vern

Trillion Dollar Triage: How Jay Powell and the Fed Battled a President and a Pandemic and Prevented Economic Disaster

By Nick Timiraos

352 pp.; Little Brown, 2022

After the initial stages of the 2007-2009 financial crisis, it did not take long for the first books about the crisis to reach store shelves (virtual and brick-and-mortar). The first significant collapse and bailout was Bear Stearns in March 2008, and by March 2009 William Cohan's House of Cards was out, chronicling the whole ugly episode. The Wall Street Journal's David Wessel followed in July 2009 with In Fed We Trust, which covered the major failures of what was by then recognized as a global financial crisis. (See "Will We See Another Bumper Crop of Financial Crisis Books?" Spring 2021.)

We are now starting to see a wave of books about the COVID-19 pandemic and the bounce-back from a very deep, but also very brief, recession in the spring of 2020. Nick Timiraos's Trillion Dollar Triage is one of these books, examining the Federal Reserve's pandemic response, and in particular the role that Chairman Jay Powell played in the response. Timiraos is the Wall Street Journal's chief economics correspondent and not coincidentally his beat is the Federal Reserve and U.S. economic policy. Trillion Dollar Triage is his first book.

Powell: the early years / The first third of Trillion Dollar Triage provides important background information. Chairman Powell's early career path is described, with a focus on his stint at the Treasury Department under Secretary Nicholas Brady, including during the instability in the commercial and residential real estate markets in the early 1990s. There is also a concentrated history of the Federal Reserve, from the Panic of 1907 that brought the Fed into existence to the term of Chairman Ben Bernanke, who presided over the response to the housing bubble collapse. The book describes the horse-trading that led to Powell's nomination to the Fed's Board of Governors by President Barack Obama in 2011, as well as Powell's efforts to turn back the "Audit the Fed" movement during his full term on the board that began in 2014. Also included is a telling of President Donald Trump's interviewing of Fed chair candidates after he decided not to reappoint Janet Yellen in 2018. Among those on the short list were Stanford's John Taylor and former Fed governor Kevin Warsh, as well as Powell. After Powell's ascension to Fed chair, Trump asked his advisers if he could fire Powell just like he had become accustomed to doing on his TV show The Apprentice.

Echo chamber/ As expected from a book on the pandemic, the early, turbulent months from late February...