cover image The Confidence Game: How Unelected Central Bankers Are Governing the Changed Global Economy

The Confidence Game: How Unelected Central Bankers Are Governing the Changed Global Economy

Steven Solomon. Simon & Schuster, $29.5 (606pp) ISBN 978-0-684-80182-7

Former Forbes reporter Solomon believes that the tiny, secretive circle of unelected central bankers who manage the world's money supply and shape key financial policies wields too much power. The central bankers include U.S. Federal Reserve chairman Alan Greenspan, German Bundesbank president Karl Otto Pohl and Bank of England governor Eddie George and their compeers in Japan, Switzerland, France, Italy and Canada. In a gripping and disturbing report, Solomon credits central bankers with major accomplishments: beating back inflation in the early 1980s, staving off financial depression during the Third World debt crisis of 1982, checking the near free fall of the dollar, and rescuing shaky banking systems following the 1987 crash of the U.S. stock market. But Solomon is alarmed by central bankers' failure to cope with the rise of ``stateless'' capital, and he stresses that political reforms are needed to democratically regulate this ``floating monetary nonsystem'' driven by investors' whims or manias. Through some 300 interviews with bankers, finance ministers, politicians and investors, Solomon has pierced the tight-lipped, shadowy world of central banking in a dramatic expose. (June)