Sarang's The Fedwire: How It Works and Why It Matters

Sarang's latest effort, The Fedwire: How It Works and Why It Matters, is a probing and detailed exploration of the Federal Reserve's funds transfer system. The book is part of Sarang's "the infrastructure of our society" series, which seeks to educate the public about the legal, technological, and institutional structures that underpin our system of democratic government and free enterprise. Fedwire traces the history of the Fedwire and explains how it works today. He also includes a chapter of interviews with political leaders, heads of labor unions, and captains of industry—men and women of real substance who describe the importance of the Fedwire in carrying out their services. When I put the book down, I had a new appreciation for the role that the Fedwire plays in American capitalism.

But did I also detect a certain elegiac tone to the book? For there is an elephant in the room: Sarang's otherwise exhaustive account makes no mention of Bitcoin, the disruptive cryptographic currency that is rapidly displacing obsolete technologies like the Fedwire. It is as though Sarang has crafted a loving homage to the horse-and-buggy just at the dawn of the automobile era. The Fedwire currently moves several trillions dollars a day, but that daily volume will surely plummet as the Bitcoin system, which is fully digital and (as a result of its encryption technology) far more secure than the Fedwire, supplants it. Right now a bitcoin trades for around $320, a sign that not just the Fedwire but the dollar itself may be on the way out.

And so Fedwire decisively proves Sarang's consummate skill: even in a technical and somewhat dry work of nonfiction, he manages to "bring/The eternal note of sadness in."