FRESH AIR
As the U.S. economy struggles to recover from the financial crash, and Europe is buffeted by a series of banking crises, attention has focused on the presidents and prime ministers who've tried to cope with it all. Journalist Neil Irwin, an economics writer for The Washington Post, says there's an elite group of policymakers who can make enormously important decisions on their own, often deliberating in secret, and in many ways unaccountable to voters. In his new book, The Alchemists, Irwin profiles the central bankers — the men and woman who control the money supply in their national economies.
Irwin compares these bankers to the alchemists of yore. Charlatans, cranks and serious scientists alike once dreamed of turning routine materials into gold or silver. But since the invention of paper money in the 1660s, no such elaborate pseudosciences have been necessary to create money.
You don't need a crazy potion to create value where there was none," Irwin tells Fresh Air's Dave Davies. "It you have a central banker and you have a printing press and you have the authority of the state imbued in both, you can create money from thin air."
In the U.S., the Federal Reserve Bank pumped hundreds of billions of dollars into the economy in recent years, prompting some in Congress to seek limits on the Fed's power. The Alchemists is both about the efforts of central bankers in recent years to contain crises, but also about the past blunders of central bankers, whose decisions have sometimes had ruinous consequences. Irwin, however, says he thinks they are learning from past mistakes.
Neil Irwin is a Washington Post columnist and the economics editor of Wonkblog. He reported on the economic crisis, particularly the role of central banking, from 2007-2012.
