Amazon.ca:Customer reviews: The Lords of Easy Money: How the Federal Reserve Broke the American Economy

An insightful book severely compromised by Mr Leonard's frequent digressions into Trump hating, perpetuating the discredited official Coronavirus narrative and election-fraud denial, none of which are really relevant to the subject at hand. Presumably he wants to appease his patrons at The New York Times and Washington Post.

7 people found this helpful

Andrew Ballard

Not awe inspiring but informative

Reviewed in the United Kingdom on February 6, 2022

Verified Purchase

Leonard does a decent job in describing the decisions the Fed made in the free money era. I'm a professional investor, I lived through all these activities, but I still learned something.

I'd prefer fewer anecdotes, more hard data, but that's not really the point of the book.

One person found this helpful

Fan of BTC

A must read

Reviewed in the United Kingdom on March 5, 2022

Verified Purchase

Absolutely fascinating account of US central bank policies over the last few decades and the distortions these policies create in the markets and society as a whole. Certainly not the conclusion of the author but many people reading this book will invariably come to the same conclusion that I did - bitcoin fixes this!

One person found this helpful

Good Lord

Reviewed in Singapore on April 16, 2022

Verified Purchase

John Feltner lived in Dallas Texas was laid off and determined to get a job at Rexnord, he drove 15 hours to Milwaukee for an interview. He got the job, but was eventually laid off again because Rexnord decided to move its production line to Mexico. To add insult to injury, Feltner was offered a temporary reprieve so that he could train the Mexicans. He declined. The financial and social woes of the Feltner family are just a microcosm of the state of USA today. What then, is the big picture? That is what this book by Leonard is all about.

It explains in simple, accessible language, complex economic problems that has mired the American economy for decades. Leonard pins the blame on the Federal Reserve, the central bank of the USA (‘the Fed’). It is accountable to no one – not even Congress – yet it wields all the power that shapes the US economy. According to Leonard, the ZIRP, or ‘Zero Interest Rate Policy’ adopted by the Fed, in a nutshell, has been enriching the top 1% of America’s population, and driving the bottom, and the middle-class like the Feltners, deeper and deeper into financial impoverishment.

In a fascinating account, Leonard explains the bizarre ZIRP policy that drives investors away from safe investments like Treasury bonds, because of zero interest, and into riskier investments where the returns are higher. The second act of the Fed is the habit of ‘quantitative easing’, the process of printing and pumping money into the economy such that the banks, hedge funds, and investors have too much cash and no where to go (the Treasury bonds have low yield, remember?) so they are all channelled to risky investments. What are they? They are investments in high asset value stocks. The problem is that the high asset values are mostly artificially created.

Rexnord, for example, is a company that manufactures engineering goods such as ball bearings for aeroplanes. But, the new management found that by cost-cutting (closing departments and laying off workers), and concentrating on the paper restructuring of its debts then selling them off, the company keeps rolling in profits – without actually expanding its physical business.

Where will all this lead to, and how will it end? Leonard is not optimistic. If his analysis is correct, America has plenty to worry about. Those who have some money to invest may worry about the bubble. When it bursts, there will be lots of wailing and gnashing of teeth. Leonard ends thus: ‘The long crash of 2008 had evolved into the long crash of 2020. The bills had yet to be paid.’

Amazon Customer

Gran libro! Referencia exacta del roll de la FED

Reviewed in Mexico on February 9, 2022

Verified Purchase

Gran libro. Perfectamente explica el roll de la FED y cómo imprimir dinero solo nos llevará de una crisis a otra sin saber qué alguna de ellas nos alejará cada vez de valores reales y creará más caos e inestabilidad social y económica. Podría ser que COVID 19 solo evidenció lo débil del sistema financiero y la distancia que se encuentra una recesión verdadera.

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Malhar Manek

Brilliant Book

Reviewed in India on July 7, 2022

Verified Purchase

The book is very well-written and simple to understand for anyone with a basic understanding of macroeconomics. A very useful guide for anyone wanting to understand the current times of the US economy wrt QE

One person found this helpful

PWB

Good background material, serious mistakes and incorrect information on the financial side though...

Reviewed in the United States on January 20, 2022

Verified Purchase

Let's start off on the positive side... the background information on Hoenig and Powell is very interesting and well written. Former KC Fed President Hoenig was the one voting against much of the balance sheet expansionary policies during Bernanke's term and provides the main thesis of the book which is that balance sheet expansion lead to asset bubbles, which helps the top 1% and hurts everyone who doesn't own assets. This is a fairly accepted view in the mainstream and the author does a good job building this argument.

Unfortunately if you are looking to expand your finance knowledge, this book has some serious drawbacks, including many items that any good editor would have caught. The most blatant one, and one that had me cringe every time he wrote this, was not understanding what a "Treasury Bill" is. T-Bills are short term debt instruments, issued by the Treasury at a discount, that do not have a coupon and mature under a year. Treasury Notes and Bonds are longer maturities and have coupons. This is easily verified by a quick google search. Throughout the book the author consistently confuses the two... in fact, he goes so far as to put in a glossary of terms including the incorrect definition of a T-Bill. It is as if no one who knew anything about fixed income read this book. The author also goes into depth about the repo spike in September 2019 as an expert. He makes some serious mistakes about the rates of repo being purely a function of the credit risk of the counterparty, not the market price of borrowing. This, unlike the T-Bill snafu, is a very complicated issue but the author showed his lack of understanding by making some big mistakes. The author shows his bias against hedge funds when discussing Treasury basis trades, when not understanding that banks are just as big in that trade. There is another mistake where the author said after QE the Fed was selling bonds, but they were rolling them off; this is a subtle distinction, but fairly large in the market context. There was a time before they sold, but not in the time he mentioned.

When the author is giving background information on member of the Fed, the writing is great. When he tries to explain financial terms or transactions, he gets out of his comfort zone and for those who are experts, it's very frustrating to read and is riddled with mistakes. It's a quick read, and I agree with the thesis, but it could have been just a long magazine article instead.

121 people found this helpful

Robert Ray

A very important book for everyone to read

Reviewed in the United States on January 26, 2022

Verified Purchase

This is a very good (popularized) book about the disaster the Federal Reserve's zero interest rate and qualitative easing policies are creating for the U.S. (and the rest of the world). The only way out is continued high inflation over 5 % and/or a a financial collapse as legions of borrowers find their zero rate loans have either repriced to levels they can no longer pay or they can no longer roll over their junk debt at all. Leonard includes the horror stories of how the Fed deliberately set policies to transfer money from the middle and lower classes to Wall Street in the belief that this would get the economy going (when told that Texas Instruments executives were using cheap debt to buy back stock instead of investing Bernanke's response was to "not overweight the macroeconomic opinions of private sector people who are not trained in economics"). He also makes clear that the Fed had no idea of how it could ever end its money printing without great damage to the markets and economy.
The great irony of course (irony is a concept evidently unknown to progressives) is that the author is in favor of government programs to 'help' the country (he believes the Fed had to act because Tea Party and other Republicans refused to expand government spending or add new programs) while he has written a book showing how a rogue government agency is actually destroying the country (the book's subtitle is "How the Federal Reserve Broke the American economy" - possibly an understatement).
The author and publisher (editing and fact-checking is something that publishers have decided is a waste of money) did not help themselves because no one with any financial or business experience proofread the book, so there are some glaring mistakes (which the Fed's enablers could use to persuade people not to believe the book). On page 9 for example he doesn't seem to understand the gold standard. On page 49 he is totally confused about bank loans. A bank's asset is a loan not the collateral; the borrower still owns the collateral (until it's foreclosed). Collateral is almost always a physical asset, a last resort if the loan isn't paid back; a loan is made because the cash flow from the borrower's business seems to be sufficient to repay the loan. On page 289 there is a very strange 'statistic': "Robinhood earned about $ 19,000 for each dollar that a normal retail customer had in their account" (how could any company, even drug lords, turn one customer dollar into $ 19,000 is unimaginable to me).
This is still a very important book, one that everyone should read.

8 people found this helpful

Tim Knight

Truly wanted to like it, but disappointed at lack of content

Reviewed in the United States on February 5, 2022

Verified Purchase

To be honest, I’m not quite sure why I’m doing a review of a book I didn’t like, but perhaps I can save you the trouble. The book in question is one whose title suggested I would absolutely love it, which is The Lords of Easy Money, and ostensibly it is about how the Federal Reserve has caused the grotesque maldistribution of wealth in the country. I’m a bit confounded at the 4.6 stars out of 5 on Amazon, as well as the fact that it is selling so well, because I was sorely disappointed, even though I really wanted to like it.

The book itself is over 300 pages, but I polished it off in a couple of sittings. As a writer myself, it was easy for me to see what the author was up to – – trying to take a relatively dry subject and turn it into something dramatic. I kept thinking to myself, “I hope my writing doesn’t come off this way.” It was awkward.

The main beef with the book is that I didn’t learn a damned thing. It was largely a narrative about personalities – – Hoenig and Powell, mostly – – whereas I was hoping for a scientific, fact-based analysis of the harm the Fed has caused. I regret highlighting the book (a habit I’ve never shaken) since now I can’t return it for a refund. Sorry, but yuck.

6 people found this helpful

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