Ben Bernanke’s personal memoir of his time at the Federal Reserve and handling of the financial crisis will be titled “The Courage to Act: A Memoir of a Crisis and Its Aftermath” and will go on sale Oct. 5 of this year.
The former Fed chairman’s publisher, W.W. Norton, revealed the book’s publication details Wednesday, including a book website.
“We believe that the title reflects the bold, effective, and often politically unpopular steps Dr. Bernanke and his colleagues took to address a historically unprecedented situation. Ben Bernanke’s unique position and perspective make this memoir a groundbreaking work and offer a story that cannot be told elsewhere,” Norton President W. Drake McFeely said in a statement.
Bernanke is currently a scholar at the Brookings Institution in Washington, D.C., where he has been working on his book and recently began blogging on economic topics.
The former academic and George W. Bush adviser joined the Fed in 2002 and became chairman in 2006. He presided over the slide of the U.S. into a financial crisis and deep recession and oversaw its unprecedented efforts to stem the financial panic and use unconventional monetary policy to promote a recovery.
Other key federal officials in office during the crisis who worked closely with Bernanke, including former Treasury secretaries Henry Paulson and Timothy Geithner, have already written about the experience in memoirs. Those books provided new details about the bailouts and stimulus efforts.
Bernanke’s book’s blurb is as follows:
Ben Bernanke pulls back the curtain on the tireless and ultimately successful efforts to prevent a mass economic failure. Working with two U.S. presidents and two Treasury secretaries, Dr. Bernanke and his colleagues used every Fed capability, no matter how arcane, to keep the U.S. economy afloat. From his arrival in Washington in 2002 and his experiences before the crisis to the intense days and weeks of the crisis itself, and through the Great Recession that followed, Dr. Bernanke gives readers an unequaled perspective on the American economy. This narrative will reveal for the first time how the creativity and decisiveness of a few key leaders prevented an economic collapse of unimaginable scale.
