A Discussion of Lawrence R. Jacobs and Desmond King's Fed Power: How Finance Wins

Abstract

In the wake of the 2008 financial crisis, political scientists have been paying more careful attention to the role of banking institutions as economic but also political institutions whose financial decisions involve the exercise of power and shape the conditions under which governmental decisions are made. Because the United States is still the world’s preeminent global economic power, the U.S. Federal Reserve looms particularly large in efforts to understand the financial roots of contemporary politics. Lawrence R. Jacobs and Desmond King’s Fed Power: How Finance Wins (Oxford University Press, 2016) is a major effort to analyze these questions, and so we have invited a cast of prominent political scientists to comment on the book as an account of “how finance wins.”