Bernanke Book Scheduled for Next Year

Ben Bernanke, the former chairman of the Federal Reserve Board, has a book deal.

Bernanke’s agreement is with publisher W.W. Norton & Co. for a book that will cover his years at the Fed and his response to the economic crisis. Norton told The Associated Press on Tuesday that the book, currently untitled, is scheduled for 2015.

Bernanke, 60, served on the Fed from 2002 until this year. He was appointed to two four-year terms as chairman, starting in 2006, and was succeeded by Janet Yellen.

Norton president and chairman W. Drake McFeely said Bernanke, as Fed chairman and a leading economic historian, “has had an unequaled perspective on the American economy since 2006.”

“For the first time, he will be recounting his experience in the troubling days of 2007 and 2008 as the world banking system seemed close to collapse, and then how, with an increasingly dysfunctional Congress preventing any significant fiscal policy options, it fell mainly to the Federal Reserve and to the Fed’s monetary policy to fight and remedy the biggest economic downturn since the Great Depression,” McFeely said in a statement.

Financial terms were not disclosed for the book, which was the object of a multiday auction among rival publishers. Bernanke was represented by Washington attorney Robert Barnett, who brokered a seven-figure deal for Bernanke’s predecessor, Alan Greenspan.

Bernanke was subject to criticism from both major political parties while at the Fed, with liberals believing he could have done more to fight unemployment and conservatives alleging he worried too little about inflation. At Norton, an employee-owned publisher with a long history of releasing books by authors from the Left, his fellow writers will include two of the world’s most prominent liberal economists, Nobel Prize winners Paul Krugman and Joseph Stiglitz.

Norton also publishes Michael Lewis, who has written a handful of best-sellers critical of Wall Street, most recently “Flash Boys.”

This article appeared in print in the May 7th, 2014 edition of Hamodia.