Word: greider
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AUTHOR: WILLIAM GREIDER...
...WILLIAM GREIDER HAS ALL THE credentials to be another Inside-the-Beltway TV- talk-show bore serving up sound-bite-size portions of predictable punditry. Back in 1972 when he was covering the McGovern campaign, Greider was one of Timothy Crouse's original Boys on the Bus. While an editor of the Washington Post, he prompted David Stockman's explosive 1981 confessions that Reaganomics was a fraud. A dogged reporter undeterred by smoke-and-mirrors complexity, Greider plumbed the depths of the Federal Reserve in his 1987 best seller, Secrets of the Temple...
...sharp contrast to his counterparts in the Washington journalistic firmament, Greider boasts the temperament, outlook and career trajectory of an angry outsider. For one thing, he writes these days for Rolling Stone, a publication rarely confused with, say, the New Republic. Greider's stance also sets him apart from both Establishment toadies and partisan true believers, for he is a jaded idealist almost as disgusted with tepid reformers as he is with the hoard-the-wealth excesses of the Reagan and Bush administrations...
...Greider is especially tough on Paul Volcker, chairman from 1979 until this year, for bringing inflation down much too fast. Under Volcker, writes Greider, the "Federal Reserve was determined to drive the rate of inflation lower and lower, regardless of other consequences." The consequences, in Greider's opinion, were an unnecessarily severe recession in the early 1980s, a huge trade deficit and the debt burdens that still plague the economy...
Missing from Greider's book are prescriptions for how the Fed might improve its performance. He offers no clue about how the Reserve Board can consistently pursue more stimulative policies without letting inflation get out of control. But what Secrets of the Temple does admirably is explain clearly the difficulties and dilemmas that the Federal Reserve faces -- and the dire results of its mistakes...