Wall Street Journal economics editor David Wessel 's work has been required reading/listening/viewing for anyone tracking the downs, and downs, and ups, and downs, and downs (you get the point) of the economy over the last year. Now he has a new book out: In Fed We Trust: Ben Bernanke's War on the Great Panic , Michiko Kakutani reviews the book in the New York Times , and calls it "essential, lucid — and, it turns out, riveting — reading." [Wessel's] overall assessment: “Every time officials at the Treasury or the Fed thought they finally had gotten ahead of the Great Panic, they turned out to be insufficiently pessimistic. This would be a distinguishing characteristic of this chapter in American economic history: even when officials thought they were planning for the worst-case scenario, they weren’t.” Three policy makers in particular receive low scores from Mr. Wessel. He argues that Mr. Paulson’s abrupt changes of course and failure to understand “the theater” of crisis management hurt his credibility and undermined public confidence. He says that President George W. Bush was “largely a spectator” to “the biggest threat to American prosperity in a generation” possibly because he knew how unpopular he was and figured “he would make Paulson’s job tougher if he appeared to be calling the shots” or because the Bush White House, “stumbling through its last few months, was simply exhausted and understaffed.” And he takes the former Fed chairman Alan Greenspan to task for allowing economic conditions to develop that fueled the credit crisis in the first place. Read the full review here . And read an excerpt of In Fed We Trust here .