A Real Look at William Greider Secrets Of The Temple
Most people who pick up this book are either finance students trying to understand how money actually moves, or regular folks who watched the 1987 crash and wanted to know who was really pulling the strings. The Federal Reserve is an institution designed to be opaque, and Greider spent two years embedded with it to figure out what was actually happening behind closed doors. He didn't get much cooperation, which is probably why the book came out the way it did. I ran into this book back when I was working in credit analysis at a mid-sized regional bank. We had clients asking why their loans were getting tighter even though inflation looked tame and the news said everything was fine. My supervisor just pointed me to William Greider Secrets Of The Temple and told me to stop treating the Fed like it published clear meeting notes. That was the first time I understood that monetary policy decisions don't come with instructions.
What William Greider Secrets Of The Temple Actually Covers
The book breaks down the Federal Reserve into its functional parts: the Board in Washington, the regional banks, the Open Market Committee, and the discount window mechanics. Greider traces how the Fed moved from being somewhat transparent after the 1951 Treasury Accord to becoming essentially unaccountable by the mid-1980s. He covers the Volcker era specifically, which is where things get interesting because that was the period when the Fed proved it would break the economy to kill inflation and then never really admitted it was sorry about it. One thing the book does better than almost any follow-up is explain the discount window. Most introductory texts treat it as a footnote. Greider makes it clear that the discount window is where the Fed's real power lives, not the press conferences. When banks need emergency liquidity they can't admit they need it publicly. The discount window is designed so they can't. That institutional design choice matters more than anything Paul Volcker said in public testimony. I remember dealing with a situation during a liquidity crunch where we knew other banks were borrowing at the discount window but couldn't confirm it because the Fed doesn't publish real-time data. It took weeks after the fact before anyone could piece together what was happening. That opacity is by design, and Greider explains exactly why it exists and who benefits from it.
Where the Book Falls Short
The book came out in 1987. The financial system it describes doesn't exist anymore. Too much trading happens through derivatives and shadow banking channels that the Fed barely tracks. The 2008 crisis showed that the Fed's view of the financial system was already incomplete before digital payments and algorithmic trading scaled up. Greider himself acknowledged this in later writings but never revised the book. Another limitation is that the book treats the Fed as if it operates purely from economic calculations. It doesn't really account for the political pressure that shapes decisions more than the models suggest. The relationship between the White House and the Fed is messier than Greider portrays, especially under certain administrations where political interference became more overt.
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How to Actually Use This Book
Read it alongside current Federal Reserve publications if you want it to be useful. The mechanisms Greider describes still form the backbone of how the system works. Open market operations, reserve requirements, the discount rate. These haven't disappeared. What changed is the scale and the instruments. Quantitative easing is just open market operations on steroids, which makes the original concept Greider explains more relevant, not less. Pair it with the Fed's own H.4.1 release, which shows the balance sheet changes in real time. Reading Greider first gives you the institutional context. Looking at H.4.1 after gives you the current data. That combination works better than either one alone. There's no newer official edition. You'll find used copies on Amazon, AbeBooks, or sometimes local used bookstores for three or four dollars. The PDF versions floating around are likely unauthorized scans. I don't have a direct download link because I don't host pirated material, but the book is in print through Simon and Schuster and widely available through standard retail channels.
If you want the updated version of what Greider was doing, look at works by Charles Gasparino or the Fed's own historical documents from the Beige Book archives. They don't have the same narrative drive but they cover territory Greider couldn't reach because the shadows grew bigger after he finished his research.
