Too Big to Fail: The Inside Story of How Wall Street and Washington Fought to Save the Financial System from Crisis — and Themselves

by Andrew Ross Sorkin

As a scholar of the Depression, Bernanke was cut from a different cloth, though he shared Greenspan’s belief in the free market. In his analysis of the crisis, Bernanke advanced the views of the economists Milton Friedman and Anna J. Schwartz, whose A Monetary History of the United States, 1867–1960 (first published in 1963) had argued that the Federal Reserve had caused the Great Depression by not immediately flushing the system with cheap cash to stimulate the economy. And subsequent efforts proved too little, too late. Under Herbert Hoover, the Fed had done exactly the opposite: tightening the money supply and choking off the economy.