Alchemy Leveraged

Kevin Dowd and Martin Hutchinson’s Alchemists of Loss: How Modern Finance and Government Regulation Crashed the Financial System (2010) presents a superior analysis of the origins of the worst financial crisis since the Great Depression. Although the authors cite the Federal Reserve as the main institutional cause of the crisis, they call for it to pursue Volcker-style price stability—a monetary policy that would still leave the economy vulnerable to Fed-induced booms and busts.