Lawrence Jacobs and Desmond King are to be congratulated for writing a work of political science that is addressed to citizens as well as to other scholars and experts. The style is engaging and their analysis of the mission creep of the US Federal Reserve, and of American financial power, is a call to action for all those concerned with democratic process. The call is refreshingly unusual in a field largely focused on reaching truths that can be tested by the laws of science rather than truths that are revealed through n of one analyses of what works and what fails in the messy world of politics. We are returned to classical political economy analysis and urged to move beyond liberal political science’s fascination with interests and institutions to analyse what such accounts obscure—the knowledge, finance, security and production structures of the global political economy that shape outcomes in all states (see Strange 1988).

From a feminist political economy perspective, the language of the book is familiar: breaking the silence and revealing the hidden power of the Fed, the attention to “its all about relationships” (p. 47) and “non-events” in American politics. In a nutshell, Jacobs and King argue that the Federal Reserve is responsible for bringing about a “second gilded age” with income and wealth inequality in the United States akin to the early twentieth century and the era of robber barons. For Jacobs and King, the Fed is, above all, a political institution “captured” by the finance mindset, even as it poses as non-partisan and above politics. Effectively, they assert that “Fed power” and its reliance on private capital markets and “unelected technocracy” has functioned politically to shore up the interests of rich investors over small businesses, mortgagees, and workers. It has done this by bailing out the troubled assets of selected finance companies, by engaging in “quantitative easing” as a form of fiscal stimulus that privileges finance, and via long-standing regulatory inaction with respect to banking and non-banking entities.

Fed Power’s core argument is cogent and the authors would likely agree that Marx’s analysis of capitalism was correct. In answering the question, “why do policies consistently favour finance?” they explain, this is due to “the hard-wiring of the structures of our economy and society in a global system of private markets and asset ownership” (p. 48). However, the authors eschew theory (and certainly they are wary of the potential co-optation of both economics and political science disciplines by powerful institutions like the Federal Reserve, which both funds and publishes academic research). In turning from explicit theory, they become unreflexive about the standpoint of their analysis and the implicit theories of politics submerged in their analysis of the Fed. As a result, their proposed solutions fall far short of the problems, remaining within the parameters of (unlikely) pluralist, national reform.

For instance, the distributional effects of Fed power are hardly disaggregated and measures to address them are not fleshed out. At one point it is mentioned that the Global Financial Crisis (GFC) has increased the wealth inequality between white and black households from a tenfold to a thirteen-fold gap (p. 9). At another point, we learn that it’s all about the “white guys with cash” (p. 47). But this is the extent of the analysis and there is a tendency to slip into abstract euphemisms such as “the average worker.” Yet it is crucial to know precisely who are the winners and who are the losers of Fed power to understand the social relations generating instability and crisis, and from which a movement for a Federal Reserve that better serves the public interest might be forged.

In Scandalous Economics: The Politics of Gender and Financial Crises (Hozic and True eds. 2016) we focus not merely on who benefits and who loses from the GFC and by association, from Fed power, but also “who defines and narrates the crises” and “who is becoming through the crisis,” which is ongoing (p. 13). Who is becoming is revealed by the paradox in Fed Power: that an institution whose negligence has been found to be one of the key factors in the GFC used the crisis as an opportunity to significantly expand its power well beyond its original mandate of lender of last resort. This growth in Fed power is scandalously obscured in the details of recovery programs and by economic jargon (“quantitative easing” as a case in point). But it is also masked by Jacobs and King’s narrative of Fed Power which overlooks the submerged story of the female whistle-blowers and regulators, many of them with law backgrounds, and the male financiers, most of them with finance/economics backgrounds. As a result, the book misses the opportunity to interrogate the professional socialisation and gender norms that support “group think” and unchecked financial power and knowledge. All women mentioned in the book are either insider, political, or scholarly critics of the Federal Reserve’s exceptional governance: Think Sheila Bair, Elizabeth Warren, Carmen Segarra, Gillian Tett . . . and even Janet Yellen, mentioned solely for her concern for, though limited power to address, inequality. There is something to be studied here with respect to the relationship between knowledge, financial power, and gender.

This is important because, after the GFC, one of the major institutional responses of banks and firms in light of perceptions of excess risk and moral failure has been to increase the gender diversity of their governance boards. Women are called on to “clean-up” and to provide ethical leadership. Some research indicates that finance corporations with a better gender balance on their boards recovered more rapidly after the GFC. However, with a critical lens we can see that such measures to address the legitimacy of finance institutions, a major concern for Jacobs and King, are unlikely to remove the systematic bias toward the already wealthy and powerful (disproportionately white and male persons) embedded in the formal and informal institutions of global finance.

The GFC has created an opportunity for contesting the normal, masculine ways of governing the (global) economy. But that opportunity has largely been concealed by populist scandals and the diversion of our attention to blameworthy individuals, corporations and institutions, such as the Fed, and away from the globalized structures and processes of political economy. Jacobs and King’s analysis may replicate this same problem. Blaming the Fed, it lacks an account of the transnational power of finance in relation to equally transnational security, knowledge and production structures. Power within all these structures is mobilized by gender, race and class-specific subjectivities that are constituted without regard to national citizenship and have an impact well beyond the boundaries of American politics and democracy. Attention to these subjectivities and forms of agency is therefore an important corrective and complement to the project of Fed Power. Such a project has never been more important for American political science – now that a poster boy for capitalist excess is in the White House and an ex-Goldman Sachs banker, dubbed a “foreclosure king” for buying up distressed mortgages and evicting thousands of homeowners after the GFC, heads the US Treasury.