Introduction

Prepare to enter the enigmatic world of a Federal Reserve Bank with Lucy, an employee in its early days who has haunted its Research Department ever since her death there over a century ago.

Stella, a current long-time executive in the Research Department, has devoted her career to the Fed’s public mission and believed that her years of successful work had earned her job security.

However, when Wendell becomes her boss and begins implementing his own vision for the Department, Stella isn’t included in his plans.

Despite clashing with Wendell, Stella is oblivious to the threat to her job until it’s too late. And when a personal tragedy coincides with the termination of her job, Stella’s faith in the Fed is shaken.

As Lucy shares moments from her own life in the early 1900s, she offers a distinctive view of Stella’s situation while challenging readers to question their own understanding of the source of the Fed’s power in its work to support a healthy U.S. economy.

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Excerpt

Lucy
Your willingness to trust those you’ve never met is both a wonder and a fright.

I’ve been among some of those you’ve trusted since I died, here, in a Federal Reserve Bank, in 1915.
I’d come to see Mr. Myers. He was my boss during the months I worked here as a Secretary and a friend afterwards. Ever enthralled by his role in opening this Federal Reserve Bank the November before, he’d written an essay about the Fed Bank’s promises and challenges for my new baby’s commonplace book. ... view entire excerpt...

Discussion Questions

From the author:

1. The story begins, “Your willingness to trust those you’ve never met is both a wonder and a fright.” Do you agree?

2. Was any of the information about the Federal Reserve new or a surprise to you? Is the information useful to you?

3. About Everett’s letter for their son, Lucy describes being “grateful with the kind of gratitude that is a shock of sorts, when something important and good happens only because one failed in their own best intents.” Have you experienced that kind of gratitude?

4. With the Federal Reserve’s dual mandate for jobs and stable prices in mind, what would you tell the Fed’s Research Departments to research?

5. Have you ever kept a commonplace book, journal, or scrapbook? Do you imagine it being discovered after your death? Have you inherited one from someone else?

6. Stella tells Adam she doesn’t remember the file he gives her. Did you think she wrote it anyway or that Lucy wrote it?

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