THE LORDS OF EASY MONEY

The New York Times bestselling business journalist Christopher Leonard infiltrates one of America's most mysterious institutions - the Federal Reserve - to show how its policies over the past ten years have accelerated income inequality and put our country's economic stability at risk.

Leonard shows that today's unprecedented income inequality and financial crashes is caused in large part by the Federal Reserve. The Fed has a unique power to reshape the American economy for the worse, which it did, fatefully, on November 4, 2010 through a radical intervention called quantitative easing. In just a few short years, the Fed more than quadrupled the money supply with one goal: to encourage banks and other investors to extend more risky debt. Ten years later, the gap between the rich and poor has grown dramatically, stock prices are trading far above what's justified by actual corporate profits, corporate debt in America is at an all-time high, and this debt is being traded by big banks on Wall Street, leaving them vulnerable - just as they were during the mortgage boom. Middle-class wages have barely budged in a decade, and consumers are buried under credit card debt, car loan debt, and student debt.

The Lords of Easy Money tells the shocking, riveting tale of how quantitative easing is imperiling the American economy through the story of the one man who tried to warn us.

Christopher Leonard is a business reporter whose work has appeared in The New York Times, The Wall Street Journal, Fortune, and Bloomberg Businessweek. He is the New York Times bestselling author of The Meat Racket and Kochland, which won the J. Anthony Lukas Work-in-Progress Award.