Perry Mehrling, The New Lombard Street: How the Fed Became the Dealer of Last Resort, Princeton: Princeton University Press, November 2010, 184 pages

The ambitious title of this important book recalls the famous and influential work of the editor of The Economist, Walter Bagehot, whose Lombard Street: A Description of the Money Market, appeared in 1873. Bagehot’s book was a direct outcome of and response to the severe British financial crisis of 1866, when he had written an article in The