The Courage to Act (or the courage to finish that book)

I finally did it, finished Ben Bernake very defensive memoir of his tenure as Fed Chairman. Unfortunately I cannot recommend it, unnecessarily long and far too obsessed with making it clear that he was not a shy, hesitating head of the Federal Reserve; but rather one that took action when his country needed it. I agree with that, but to write your recollections of such hard times by just trying to show that you took action when such was needed did not help the book (says me who has never written one). In any case, below what I highlighted at different places (i.e. my apartment, subways and airplanes).

• "5 Cans of Soup for $1". A student walks in and asks, "How much for 10 cans?" The clerk replies, "Are your from Harvard and can't count or from MIT and can't read".
• ... the tone of my remarks was sometimes harsh. At a conference in Boston in January 2000, I had started by asking whether Japanese officials were suffering from "self-induced paralysis", accused them of having "hidden behind minor institutional or technical difficulties in order to avoid taking action", criticized them for " confused or inconsistent" responses ... [so on and so forth go Bernanke recollections here] ... In 2011, in response to a question from a Japanese newspaper correspondent, I confessed, "I'm a little bit more sympathetic to central bankers now than I was ten years ago."
• Some have argued--most prominently, Stanford economist John Taylor--that I've depicted the choice between achieving the Fed's inflation and employment goals, on the one hand, and letting the air out of the housing bubble, on the other, too starkly. Taylor argues that somewhat higher interest rates during the early 2000s could have cooled the bubble while still keeping inflation on track [...] with a simple rule that he developed.
• On October 24 [2007], Merril Lynch reported the biggest quarterly loss in its ninety-three-year history, $2.3 billion, and disclosed for the first time that it had $15 billion in complex collateralized debt obligation (CDOs)--backed by subprime mortgage securities--on its books.
• ...1995, when Bob Rubin and Larry Summers were leading President Clinton's Treasury Department, to lend $20 billion to Mexico to help stabilize the plummeting peso.
• As Hank Paulson would note in his memoir, while he was struggling to obtain $700 billion from Congress to help the entire financial system, the FDIC had agreed to guarantee $270 billion in loans for a single bank and nobody seemed to notice.
• Providing $700 billion of new capital, on the other hand, would increase the capital of the banking system by half or more, reassuring creditors and customers and bolstering banks' confidence to lend.
• Because much wholesale funding [...] was directly or indirectly collateralized, firms and regulators saw little risk of runs. [...] shortage of safe, liquid assets. In response Wall Street firms, seeing a profit opportunity, employed financial engineers to convert riskier and less liquid assets into seemingly safe assets in large quantities.