Books by Mitchel Y. Abolafia

Mitchel Abolafia goes behind the scenes with the Federal Reserve's powerful Open Market Committee as it responded to the 2008 financial crisis. Relying on verbatim transcripts of closed meetings, Abolafia shows how assumptions about self-correcting markets stymied the Fed and how its leaders came to embrace new ideas.

Making Markets, an ethnography of Wall Street culture, offers a comprehensive picture of how the market and its denizens work. Markets appear here as socially constructed institutions in which the behavior of traders is suspended in a web of customs, norms, and structures of control.