The Courage to Act A Memoir of a Crisis and Its Aftermath

In 2006, Ben S. Bernanke was appointed chair of the Federal Reserve, capping a meteoric trajectory from a rural South Carolina childhood to professorships at Stanford and Princeton, to public service in Washington's halls of power. There would be no time to celebrate, however—the burst of the housing bubble in 2007 set off a domino effect that would bring the global financial system to the brink of meltdown. InThe Courage to Act, Bernanke pulls back the curtain on his efforts to prevent a mass economic failure, working with two U.S. presidents and using every Fed capability, no matter how arcane, to keep the U.S. economy afloat. His experiences during the initial crisis and the Great Recession that followed give listeners an unequaled perspective on the American economy since 2006, and his narrative will reveal for the first time how the creativity and decisiveness of a few key leaders prevented an economic collapse of unimaginable scale.