(FORTUNE Magazine) – In The Politics of Money: The Fed Under Alan Greenspan (Simon & Schuster, $24.95), David M. Jones critiques the performance of the chairman of the Federal Reserve system -- recently reappointed to a second term by President Bush -- and compares him with his predecessors. Jones, who tracks the Fed for the Wall Street bond trading house of Aubrey G. Lanston & Co., gives Greenspan a grade of 85 -- roughly a B. The book rates only a C. Jones is best at laying out the nitty-gritty of monetary policymaking: how Fed officials make decisions, what indicators they watch, and how their actions affect financial markets and the economy. But most readers will choke on the level of detail he provides. (A typical table shows -- month by month -- the aggregate level of five different measures of money and debt for four years, along with both monthly and quarterly percentage changes.) True Fed junkies will prefer Jones's earlier book, Fed Watching and Interest Rate Projections: A Practical Guide (1986), which delves into these topics even more deeply. JONES IS LESS SURE-FOOTED when he puts down his Fed-watching microscope and tries to assay the big picture. His analyses of the LBO wave, globalization, and recent troubles in the banking industry are both familiar and uneven. The savings and loan crisis rates only a page and a half, while he devotes five to a blow-by-blow account of the near failure of one Texas bank. The Politics of Money gives Greenspan mediocre marks for some curious reasons. Exhibit A in Jones's criticism is what he calls the Thanksgiving Fiasco, an ominous-sounding event that turns out to have been a misunderstanding between the Fed and bond traders over whether the Fed wanted to move short-term interest rates lower over the course of a few days in November 1989. We're talking sixteenths of a percentage point here! No one outside the Wall Street Fed-watching community cared a whit about this contretemps -- then or thereafter.

Jones also argues that Greenspan should have seen the recent recession coming and acted more aggressively to counteract it. He predicts that asset deflation -- falling commodity and real estate prices -- and a continuing credit crunch will slow consumer spending in the early 1990s and could push a debt-heavy economy ''over the edge into a deep recession.'' Maybe. But it seems more likely history will show Jones's indictment of the Fed, his reading of recent economic history, and his predictions were all overwrought.