To Stop a Crisis
- Title: To Stop a Crisis
- By: Justin Muzinich
- Release Date: 2027-02-02
- Genre: Economics
More by Justin Muzinich : To Stop a Crisis
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A riveting hour-by-hour account of the frantic days in spring 2020 when the onset of the Covid-19 pandemic brought the US economy to the brink of collapse—with urgent lessons about future crises.
After the Covid pandemic reached the United States in March 2020, GDP fell by more than 30 percent in a matter of weeks, and twenty-two million Americans found themselves abruptly unemployed, the largest economic collapse since the Great Depression. But behind the scenes alarm bells were ringing that the situation was about to get much worse, perhaps irreversibly so.
To Stop a Crisis tells the inside story, for the first time, of our nation’s brush with total economic catastrophe—and the steps taken by a small group of people to prevent it. The book reveals how exposed 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 to 2021, takes us inside the rooms where government officials scrambled to stay one step ahead of economic free fall, working to secure imploding markets and head off devastating consumer panic. Along the way, readers will meet Treasury Secretary Steven Mnuchin, who, weighing the risks of massive government intervention, would back the largest fiscal stimulus bill in history; Federal Reserve Chair Jay Powell, who would take unprecedented steps to stabilize the markets; and many others behind the scenes who hammered 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 vulnerability to the next disaster—whatever form it may take.