About this item
When the first fissures became visible to the naked eye in August 2007, suddenly the most powerful men in the world were three men who were never elected to public office. They were the leaders of the world’s three most important central banks: Ben Bernanke of the U.S. Federal Reserve, Mervyn King of the Bank of England, and Jean-Claude Trichet of the European Central Bank. Over the next five years, they and their fellow central bankers deployed trillions of dollars, pounds and euros to contain the waves of panic that threatened to bring down the global financial system, moving on a scale and with a speed that had no precedent. Neil Irwin’s The Alchemists is a gripping account of the most intense exercise in economic crisis management we’ve ever seen, a poker game in which the stakes have run into the trillions of dollars.
About the Author
Neil Irwin is senior economic correspondent at The New York Times and author of How to Win in a Winner-Take-All World and The Alchemists. Irwin writes frequently about the global economic trends; the changing nature of work and employment; financial markets and monetary policy; and how these big-picture shifts affect everyone who is trying to make their way in the modern economy.Irwin was a founding staff member of The Upshot, the Times's site for analytical and explanatory journalism. He was previously a reporter and columnist at The Washington Post, where he led coverage of the global financial crisis.He often analyzes economic trends on television and radio, including appearances on the PBS Newshour, CBS This Morning, BBC America, MSNBC, CNBC, CNN, and public radio's Marketplace.Irwin has an M.B.A. from Columbia University, where he was a Knight-Bagehot Fellow in Economic and Business Journalism.
