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Christopher Leonard on the Federal Reserve and The Lords of Easy Money
Leonard returns to his native Kansas City to discuss how Fed policy reshaped the American economy.
Quick facts
Business · Investigative
The Meat Racket: The Secret Takeover of America’s Food Business
Leonard’s debut traces how a handful of companies, led by Tyson Foods, came to control nearly the entire American meat supply through a system called vertical integration, in which contract farmers take on the debt and risk of raising chickens and hogs while corporations control the prices, the birds, and the terms. He shows how a system built around cheap meat for consumers created a form of indentured servitude for the farmers producing it.
The Meat Racket got renewed attention in 2020 when COVID outbreaks tore through meatpacking plants and exposed exactly the fragility Leonard had spent a book describing years earlier. It’s the clearest possible demonstration of his method: find the industry everyone assumes is boring, and show that its consolidation has consequences that eventually land on everyone’s plate.
Business · HistoryOn my shelf
Kochland: The Secret History of Koch Industries and Corporate Power in America
An eight-year reporting project into how Koch Industries grew from a regional pipeline company into one of the largest private corporations in the world, and how Charles Koch used that growth to build a political-influence operation that reshaped American conservatism and climate policy. Leonard treats Koch Industries as a lens onto the entire second half of twentieth-century American capitalism, not just a single company’s history.
Kochland won the J. Anthony Lukas Work-in-Progress Award for good reason — it’s the rare business book that works as both rigorous corporate history and a genuinely gripping read at 704 pages. Leonard gets remarkable access to a company famous for secrecy, and uses it to explain how markets, politics, and money actually move together rather than treating them as separate stories.
Economics · Federal Reserve
The Lords of Easy Money: How the Federal Reserve Broke the American Economy
Leonard turns to the Federal Reserve, using former Kansas City Fed president Thomas Hoenig — the lone dissenting vote against years of near-zero interest rates and quantitative easing after the 2008 crisis — as his guide into how Fed policy has inflated asset prices, widened inequality, and left the economy dependent on interventions that were supposed to be temporary. Leonard has called it, half-jokingly, the fourth part of a trilogy that started with Kochland.
This is the least visible of the three books in terms of subject matter — monetary policy doesn’t sell itself — and the most quietly alarming. Leonard makes the Federal Reserve’s internal debates as readable as a corporate thriller, and Hoenig’s isolated dissent gives the book a human throughline that most explanations of quantitative easing completely lack.
Frequently asked questions about Christopher Leonard’s books
From the bookshelf
“Markets always build up and then tear down. It was an evolutionary process that never ended, and companies that tried to fight the process would only be devoured by the forces of change in the end.”
— Christopher Leonard, Kochland
For more reporting that turns consolidated economic power into a story worth understanding, browse the full shelf.
