In Fed We Trust: Ben Bernanke's War on the Great Panic

Myron Scholes Global Markets Forum

September 15, 2009, 5:30–7 p.m.

Believing that the economic catastrophe of the 1930s was largely the fault of a sluggish and wrong-headed Federal Reserve, Ben Bernanke was determined not to repeat that epic mistake. In this penetrating look inside the most powerful economic institution in the world, David Wessel illuminates its opaque and undemocratic inner workings, while revealing how the Bernanke Fed led the desperate effort to prevent the world’s financial engine from grinding to a halt.

Speaker Profiles


David Wessel is economics editor of the Wall Street Journal and writes the Capital column, a weekly look at the economy and forces shaping living standards around the world. He has shared two Pulitzer Prizes, one for Boston Globe stories in 1983 on the persistence of racism in Boston and the other for stories in 2002 in the Wall Street Journal on corporate wrongdoing. A 1975 graduate of Haverford College, he was a Knight-Bagehot Fellow in business and economics journalism at Columbia University in 1980–81.