bedtime (economic) fairytales

I first saw this novel when browsing at Barnes & Noble, and while I have not read it, the praise for the book tells me everything that is wrong with this work of historical fiction.

"Bruner and Carr provide a thorough, masterly, and highly readable account of the 1907 crisis and its management by the great private banker J. P. Morgan. Congress heeded the lessons of 1907, launching the Federal Reserve System in 1913 to prevent banking panics and foster financial stability. We still have financial problems. But because of 1907 and Morgan, a century later we have a respected central bank as well as greater confidence in our money and our banks than our great-grandparents had in theirs." -Richard Sylla, Henry Kaufman Professor of the History of Financial Institutions and Markets, and Professor of Economics, Stern School of Business, New York University

This paragraph sums up the mythological tale propagated by the establishment to set the scene for the dashingly bold technocrats to step in and to implement their planned chaos. Next follows the admission that the criminal tampering with the level of voluntary credit allocation (read: capital market) has still not perfected a method to siphon off wealth without creating great disruptions in those markets. The closing sentence is telling too; it's an assertion that the establishment has accomplished to con our generation into quiet complacency, more akin to an insult as disestablishmentarians would take it.