David Wessel

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Wall Street Journal reporter David Wessel, Haverford ’75,  has just published “In Fed We Trust”, an inside look at the Federal Reserve and “the great panic”. He and Tim Taylor ’82, managing editor of The Journal of Economic Perspectives, did a web chat about the book, the Fed, the causes of the crisis and the outlook.

Taylor Your discussions of the Fed have lots of interesting details. Ben Bernanke has trail mix on his secretary's desk and diet Dr. Pepper in his office refrigerator. The New York Fed has $195 billion in gold in the basement, 50 feet below sea level. What sort of research did you have to do to get the details and background?

 Wessel Well, I've been covering the Fed for a long time so I've actually been to that gold vault at the New York Fed. As for the other stuff, I wanted to write a book that ordinary people would find interesting and understandable. When a reporter sets out to tell a story, he or she looks -- struggles to find, actually -- those great details. On Bernanke's frig? I was talking to him and he went to it to get a Dr. Pepper.

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Talking with Tim Taylor, editor of the Journal of Economic Perspectives and a fellow Haverford alum, on the Haverford web site.

Timothy Taylor Your discussions of the Fed have lots of interesting details. Ben Bernanke has trail mix on his secretary's desk and diet Dr. Pepper in his office refrigerator. The New York Fed has $195 billion in gold in the basement, 50 feet below sea level. What sort of research did you have to do to get the details and background?

David Wessel Well, I've been covering the Fed for a long time so I've actually been to that gold vault at the New York Fed. As for the other stuff, I wanted to write a book that ordinary people would find interesting and understandable. When a reporter sets out to tell a story, he or she looks -- struggles to find, actually -- those great details. On Bernanke's frig? I was talking to him and he went to it to get a Dr. Pepper.

Read the whole conversation here

Top of the News: Fed Chairman Ben Bernanke seemed to offer a softer case today for make the central bank the super-regulator of financial institutions. Now he says there should also be "council of regulators" involved.

Anyone who has read David Wessel's In Fed We Trust probably comes away with an ambivalent view. On the one hand, the Fed was complacent in the years when the subprime mortgage crisis was building inside the very institutions it was already charged with overseeing. On the other hand, only the Fed had the power and assets to act quickly to keep last fall's panic from becoming a depression.

The real problem is the total breakdown of regulatory oversight and checks and balances in recent years. Enamored with the idea that the market would police itself, regulators, rating agencies and politicians set aside decades of successful practices, beginning with the Clinton era deregulation of financial services. Meanwhile, the unregulated shadow banking industry grew so fast and complex it had the power to take down the system with its bad bets -- and in the end the Fed and taxpayers were forced to save such bad actors as AIG.

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I spoke recently at the Commonwealth Club of San Francisco on In Fed We Trust -- on the first anniversary of the Lehman Brothers episode. Watch the video here

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