Overview
Everyone remembers the extreme disruptions in early 2020 after the COVID pandemic reached the United States: the lockdowns, the shortages, the hundreds of thousands who would die before the year’s end. But because of the focus on the health emergency, perhaps not everyone realizes how unprecedented the economic damage was: GDP collapsed by over thirty percent in a matter of weeks and 22 million Americans were newly unemployed, the most sudden and steepest decline in US history. (In ordinary times we fret about recessions in which GDP shrinks one percent, and a million people lose jobs.) Perhaps even fewer people are aware of how close the country came to total economic catastrophe.
To Stop a Crisis tells the story, for the first time, of our nation’s brush with disaster—and the steps taken by a small group of people to prevent it. In telling that story, it reveals how exposed and susceptible our financial system is to panics, and how important it is we are prepared for next time.
Justin Muzinich, US Deputy Secretary of the Treasury from 2018–2021, tells the hour-by-hour account of the near-economic catastrophe and how the government scrambled to stabilize collapsing markets and head off devastating consumer panic. Along the way, readers will meet Treasury Secretary Steven Mnuchin, who, despite his initial reluctance to expose the US government to a lot of risk through intervention, would decide to back the largest fiscal stimulus bill in history; Federal Reserve Chair Jerome Powell, who, despite coming under severe criticism from President Trump earlier in the administration for not offering sufficient stimulus, would, during the pandemic, take a great weight upon his shoulders as the state proactively intervened to stabilize the economy; and many others behind the scenes at the Treasury and the Fed, hammering out details large and small with the livelihoods of millions at stake. Readers will also meet key figures in Congress and listen in on conversations with some of the nation’s leading CEOs who appealed to Treasury while their businesses faced existential threats.
But the danger that comes with telling a success story is that it may foster a false sense of security. Instead, Muzinich urges us to learn from his critical warnings about our economy’s fragility in the face of future peril—whatever form it may take.
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