“What will not surprise you is the wisdom, wit, and insight that Alex Pollock and Howard Adler bring to this indispensable guide to financial prophecy. The future may be a closed book, but you must open—and read—this one.”—James Grant, Grant’s Interest Rate Observer “Surprised Again! will demystify finance for students and give experts a deeper understanding of things they thought they knew.”—Christopher DeMuth, Distinguished Fellow, Hudson Institute and former President, American Enterprise Institute “A masterful survey of the financial sector and its post-COVID dependence on easy money from the Federal Reserve. This book is the first place to turn for a clear exposition of key financial topics—housing, municipal debt, pension funds, student loans, cryptocurrencies, and more. The reader will be surprised yet again at the extent of financial problems lurking below the surface.”—Thomas H. Stanton, Johns Hopkins University About every ten years, we are surprised by a financial crisis. In 2020, we were Surprised Again! by the financial panic of the spring triggered by the Covid-19 pandemic. Not one of the 30 official systemic risk studies developed in 2019 had even hinted at this financial crisis as a possibility, or at the frightening economic contraction which resulted from the political responses to control the virus. In response came the unprecedented government fiscal and monetary expansions and bailouts. Later 2020 brought a second big surprise: the appearance of an amazing boom in asset prices, including stocks, houses, and cryptocurrencies. Alex Pollock and Howard Adler lived through this historic instability while serving as senior officials of the U.S. Department of the Treasury. Their book lays out the many elements of the panic and its aftermath, from the massive elastic currency operations which rode to the rescue by financing the bust with unprecedented government debt, to the consequent asset price boom, which included a renewed bubble in house prices financed by government guarantees. It considers key leveraged sectors such as commercial real estate, student loans, pension funds, banks, and the government itself. It reflects on how to understand these events both in retrospect and prospect.

While the recent economic crisis was a painful period for many Americans, the panic surrounding the downturn was fueled by an incomplete understanding of economic history. Economic hysteria made for riveting journalism and effective political theater, but the politicians and members of the media who declared that America was in the midst of the greatest financial calamity since the Great Depression were as wrong and misguided as the expansionists of the Roosevelt era. In reality the cyclical nature of market economies is as old as the markets themselves. In a free market system, financial downturns inevitably accompany economic prosperity-but the overall trend is upward progress in living standards and national wealth. While it is helpful to understand what caused the recent crisis, the more important questions to consider are 'What makes the 'boom and bust' cycle so predictable?' and 'What are the ethical responsibilities of the citizens of a free market economy?' In Boom and Bust: Financial Cycles and Human Prosperity, Alex J. Pollock argues that while economic downturns can be frightening and difficult, people living in free market economies enjoy greater health, better access to basic necessities, better education, work less arduous jobs, and have more choices and wider horizons than people at any other point in history. This wonderful reality would not exist in the absence of financial cycles. This book explains why.

Modern money, having now become a key tool of government economic policy and a source of massive tax revenues, has strayed far from its original purpose. This is doubly regrettable, as the better money functions at an individual level in satisfying demand for quality, the better it is for economic prosperity and freedom. This book presents how modern money works both in the domestic economy and globally, outlining the essence of what makes good money. How does modern money differ from this ideal? By focusing on the dichotomy between globalization on the one hand and modern money’s base in the nation state (or group of states) on the other hand, the book demonstrates how US dominance in determining monetary conditions globally has grown since the mid-1990s. The book then discusses the adverse consequences, many of which are camouflaged, of present money doctrines now so widely and radically applied, presenting novel research on how the US by pursuing bad monetary policies has been the catalyst to deepening geo-political danger. The book continues by setting out how the illusions of asset inflation will fade, most likely in the midst of economic and financial tumult. The forces which bring about that income emanate in part from the long-run costs of growing mal-investment and monopolization which occur under monetary inflation especially in the context of a digitalization revolution. Apologists for the present monetary regime rest much of their case on these illusions and on the contention that the bill for the costs comes only in the long run. This book dismantles that case. A Guide to Good Money provides readers with the sight of a pathway to a promised land of real prosperity founded on sound money beyond those lost illusions, and will be of interest to academics, students, practitioners, and central bankers.

Taking the 2008 financial crisis as his jumping off point, Alex Pollock deftly illustrates how private firms and governments alike have failed to understand the shifting risks that financial systems create. With candor, clarity, and wit, he uncovers the persistent uncertainties inherent in banking, central banking, and economics. “At the height of the 2008 financial panic, Queen Elizabeth plaintively asked why nobody saw it coming. In the winning pages of Finance and Philosophy, Her Majesty can find the answer. With a lightness of touch that belies the complexity of his subject, Alex Pollock shows why the financial future is now, why it has been and always must be a closed book. A successful banker and gifted writer, Pollock tells us all we need to know about money and banking, risk and uncertainty, debt and temptation, and science and economics. He delights as he instructs.”—James Grant, founder and editor, Grant’s Interest Rate Observer “Why can’t human beings take the lessons of boom and bust, bubbles and crashes that are clearly described in history books—and learn from experience? That’s where Mr. Pollock’s wry humor and philosophic bent help understand the hubris that makes every generation believe that not only can it predict the markets, but control them . . . [Finance and Philosophy] should be required reading in economics classes, or before opening an investment account—and by every member of Congress.”—The Washington Times Alex J. Pollock is a distinguished senior fellow at the R Street Institute in Washington, DC. He was a resident fellow at the American Enterprise Institute from 2004 to 2015, and President and Chief Executive Officer of the Federal Home Loan Bank of Chicago from 1991 to 2004.

The Long-Awaited, Enormously Entertaining Memoir by One of the Great Artists of Our Time—Now a New York Times, USA Today, Los Angeles Times, and Publisher’s Weekly Bestseller. In this candid and often hilarious memoir, the celebrated director, comedian, writer, and actor offers a comprehensive, personal look at his tumultuous life. Beginning with his Brooklyn childhood and his stint as a writer for the Sid Caesar variety show in the early days of television, working alongside comedy greats, Allen tells of his difficult early days doing standup before he achieved recognition and success. With his unique storytelling pizzazz, he recounts his departure into moviemaking, with such slapstick comedies as Take the Money and Run, and revisits his entire, sixty-year-long, and enormously productive career as a writer and director, from his classics Annie Hall, Manhattan, and Annie and Her Sisters to his most recent films, including Midnight in Paris. Along the way, he discusses his marriages, his romances and famous friendships, his jazz playing, and his books and plays. We learn about his demons, his mistakes, his successes, and those he loved, worked with, and learned from in equal measure. This is a hugely entertaining, deeply honest, rich and brilliant self-portrait of a celebrated artist who is ranked among the greatest filmmakers of our time.

This original and panoramic book proposes that the underlying forces of demography and globalisation will shortly reverse three multi-decade global trends – it will raise inflation and interest rates, but lead to a pullback in inequality. “Whatever the future holds”, the authors argue, “it will be nothing like the past”. Deflationary headwinds over the last three decades have been primarily due to an enormous surge in the world’s available labour supply, owing to very favourable demographic trends and the entry of China and Eastern Europe into the world’s trading system. This book demonstrates how these demographic trends are on the point of reversing sharply, coinciding with a retreat from globalisation. The result? Ageing can be expected to raise inflation and interest rates, bringing a slew of problems for an over-indebted world economy, but is also anticipated to increase the share of labour, so that inequality falls. Covering many social and political factors, as well as those that are more purely macroeconomic, the authors address topics including ageing, dementia, inequality, populism, retirement and debt finance, among others. This book will be of interest and understandable to anyone with an interest on where the world’s economy may be going.

Why most Americans’ finances improved during the worst economic contraction since the Great Depression—and the policy choices that made this possible In March 2020, economic and social life across the United States came to an abrupt halt as the country tried to slow the spread of COVID-19. In the worst economic contraction since the Great Depression, twenty-two million people lost their jobs between mid-March and mid-April of 2020. And yet somehow the finances of most Americans improved during the pandemic—savings went up, debts went down, and fewer people had trouble paying their bills. In The Pandemic Paradox, economist Scott Fulford explains this seeming contradiction, describing how the pandemic reshaped the American economy. As Americans grappled with remote work, “essential” work, and closed schools, three massive pandemic relief bills, starting with the CARES Act on March 27, 2020, managed to protect many of America’s most vulnerable. Fulford draws from the Consumer Financial Protection Bureau's “Making Ends Meet” surveys—which he helped design—to interweave macroeconomic trends in spending, saving, and debt with stories of individual Americans’ economic lives during the pandemic. We meet Winona, who quit her job to take care of her children; Marvin, who retired early and worried that his savings wouldn’t last; Lisa, whose expenses went up after her grown kids (and their dog) moved back home; and many others. What the statistics and the stories show, Fulford argues, is that a better, fairer, more productive economy is still possible. The success of pandemic relief policy proves that Americans’ economic fragility is not an unsolvable problem. But we have to choose to solve it.