A Fed Spirit

Description

Have you wondered who is “the Fed” that hikes and drops interest rates?Lucy hopes you do. After haunting them for over one hundred years, she sought some purpose that might end her extended existence. That purpose is introducing “the Fed” to you.Lucy intertwines moments of her own life in the early twentieth century, when the Fed was new, with a story of the work lives of a few staff in one of the Federal Reserve Banks’ Research Departments in 2018 and 2019.Stella, a longtime successful executive committed to public service, is one of these staff members. Another is Wendell, Stella’s new boss and the head of the Research Department. As a PhD, he is suspicious of his department’s powerful non-PhDs, including Stella.While the two clash over issues such as the role of empathy in the workplace and the responsibility of their department to the entirety of the Fed, Stella doesn’t realize the threat to her employment. Once it takes shape and coincides with personal tragedy, she asks whether a lifetime commitment to her employer’s mission was worth it.After leaving behind the fictional stories of Lucy and Stella, readers will be haunted by the risk of elected officials who oversee the Fed while failing to understand and respect the laws that define it. A Fed Spirit will foster discussion about how little some of us know about the Fed and how much we ought know to improve our own financial security and hold our elected officials accountable.