"The projected path of the U.S. national debt is the major challenge facing American economic policy. Without changes in tax and spending rules, the national debt will rise from 62 percent of GDP now to more than 100 percent of GDP by the end of the decade and nearly twice that level within 25...

"This book started out as a biography of the dollar, not of a man. It was intended to be an international version of the story I had told in The New Lombard Street: How the Fed Became the Dealer of Last Resort (2011). That book was a biography of the Fed, as seen through the analytical lens of...