Shutdown: How Covid Shook the World's Economy

by Adam Tooze

The Fed was a competent, high-functioning piece of the U.S. state apparatus. As such, it had unsurprisingly attracted Trump’s ire in the years prior to 2020. What was surprising was that in 2020 it became once again the driver of an expansive interventionist program of stabilization. It will be years before we have an inside view based on documentary evidence. For now, the simplest interpretation is that a team of veterans, conditioned by the experience of 2008, under undogmatic but broad-minded leadership, equipped with an acute political antenna, responded to a crisis of confidence that was threatening to become existential in the way that such a crisis demands: with maximum force. The fact that it was not accompanied by more drama was part of the confidence-building exercise.