Financial writer Lev Menand joins me to discuss his illuminating new book, The Fed Unbound. We also talk about how financial policies and priorities, for better or worse, create the society that we all in habit.

Lev Menand’s research focuses on money and banking, central banking, financial regulation, administrative law, separation of powers, corporate governance, and the history of economic thought. In 2020, he co-authored a proposal, FedAccounts: Digital Dollars, for the Federal Reserve to offer to the general public the option to hold digital currency accounts at the central bank. The FedAccounts proposal has been endorsed by The New York Times Editorial Board, and legislation to implement it has been introduced in Congress.

Menand served as senior adviser to the deputy secretary of the Treasury from 2015 to 2016 and as senior adviser to the assistant secretary for Financial Institutions from 2014 to 2015. While at the Treasury, he worked on financial regulatory reform, financial sector cybersecurity, Treasury market infrastructure, financial inclusion, and U.S. investment security. Menand was previously an economist at the Federal Reserve Bank of New York in the Supervision Group, where he was part of the Governance and Culture Reform initiative, and in its Research and Statistics Group, where he helped to develop econometric models for the Federal Reserve System’s first Comprehensive Capital Assessment and Review. While at the New York Fed, he was seconded to the Financial Stability Oversight Council, where he helped to prepare the council’s first financial stability report.

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