The global curse of the Federal Reserve: manifesto for a second monetarist revolution

Foreword by Alex J. Pollock, resident fellow at the American Enterprise Institute, Washington DC, USA.

He was President and CEO of the Federal Home Loan Bank of Chicago from 1991 to 2004 and is the author of Boom and Bust (2011).A must read for anyone seeking protection against the forces of economic destruction unleashed by the Federal Reserve. "The Global Curse of the Federal Reserve is a detailed and highly informative history of US monetary policy.

It spares few reputations but not in the name of sensationalism - Mr. Brown simply is repeating the warnings of Austrian-school titans such as Friedrich Hayek against putting too much discretionary power over highly complex economic processes into the hands of fallible humans.

Fed chairman Paul Volcker in the 1980s confessed that he couldn't outsmart the markets.

But Fed chairmen over the years nonetheless have tried repeatedly to do that, usually at the behest of politicians who are, contrary to the myth of Fed 'independence', their political masters.

No one has tried more dangerously to be a mastermind of this than Ben Bernanke.

Mr. Brown proposes as a remedy a rule-based system for controlling the monetary base, a replication of how the gold standard once worked so successfully, but without the gold.

In this era of deep and legitimate doubts about the conduct of monetary policy, his book is an important and highly readable contribution to the discussion." - George Melloan, former editorial page deputy editor and columnist at The Wall Street Journal and author of The Great Money Binge, Spending Our Way to Socialism.