My interest in money (understanding it, not so much making it!) dates from undergraduate days at Harvard, 1977-1981, exactly the time when the dollar system was being put back together under Volcker after the international monetary disorder and domestic stagflation of the 1970s. The previous decade had very much disrupted the personal economics of my family, perhaps in much the same way that the Depression had disrupted Kindleberger’s, and set me off on a lifelong quest to understand why. Forty years and four books later, I feel like I have made some progress, and hope that my book can save readers forty years in their own question to understand money!
I wrote...
Money and Empire: Charles P. Kindleberger and the Dollar System
The story of the rise of the global dollar system, through the eyes of its keenest observer, Charles P. Kindleberger, this book is in effect a dual biography of the dollar and the man.
The collapse of the old sterling system in 1931, and the world depression that followed, posed the central intellectual problem that the man tackled in his PhD of 1937, and his subsequent central banking career at the Fed and BIS. The eventual stabilization of the new dollar system at Bretton Woods in 1944 provided the context for the man’s academic career at MIT starting in 1948. And Nixon’s abandonment of Bretton Woods in 1971 was the context for the man’s shift to economic history in retirement after 1976.
Browsing my shelves in preparation for this book list, this one in particular jogged my memory as an important influence on my own book, an influence so internalized that I completely forgot about and never cited it! I remedy that lapse here.
My copy of the book is heavily underlined with lots of stars in the margin, so I know it was important. You can see from the title that the author is concerned with the same tension between money and empire, he as a historian and me as an economist.
Now that I have finished my own book, I’ll be rereading this early influence to engage with its argument more deeply and directly.
Modern America owes the Roman Empire for more than gladiator movies and the architecture of the nation's Capitol. It can also thank the ancient republic for some helpful lessons in globalization. So argues economic historian Harold James in this masterful work of intellectual history. The book addresses what James terms "the Roman dilemma" - the paradoxical notion that while global society depends on a system of rules for building peace and prosperity, this system inevitably leads to domestic clashes, international rivalry, and even wars. As it did in ancient Rome, James argues, a rule-based world order eventually subverts and destroys…
My own book title is explicitly an homage to this book, which tells the story of the sterling standard in its heyday.
It is my dream that readers will put my book next to this one on their bookshelves, reading mine as a continuation of the story that DeCecco tells so masterfully. He is more economic historian, and I am more historian of economic ideas, so the books are different (and his original was in Italian), but they can be read as in conversation with one another.
This is another book that I look forward to rereading, now that I know more, and engaging more deeply and systematically.
When Nixon took the dollar off gold in 1971, Kindleberger thought it was the end of the dollar system, and maybe even the beginning of a new depression, in parallel with the 1931 collapse of the sterling system.
He was wrong about that, and the reason was the resilience of the global banking system, which basically refused to abandon the dollar even though the dollar had abandoned it!
This book tells the story of the rise of the Eurobond market, the capital market counterpart to the offshore Eurodollar market, which grew up organically in the 1970s and after.
One of the things I like most about this book is that the author is a practitioner, so the story is told from the point of view of one who was there.
Bonds without Borders tells the extraordinary story of how the market developed into the principal source of international finance for sovereign states, supranational agencies, financial institutions and companies around the world. Written by Chris O'Malley a veteran practitioner and Eurobond market expert- this important resource describes the developments, the evolving market practices, the challenges and the innovations in the Eurobond market during its first half- century. Also, uniquely, the book recounts the development of security and banking regulations and their impact on the development of the international securities markets. In a corporate world crying out for financing, never has an…
This book tells the story of the global expansion of the dollar system after the collapse of Bretton Woods from the perspective of the BIS, the global central bank.
Created in 1930, as a last-ditch effort to backstop the sterling system (among other reasons), the story of the BIS runs parallel to the story I tell in my book. This morning in class I asked my students, most of them international relations majors, if any of their other courses had mentioned the BIS, and not a single hand went up. Hence this recommendation!
Kindleberger worked at the BIS 1939-1940 and might well have made it his permanent home had not World War II intervened, and sent him back home to the Fed.
As the global organisation of central banks, the Bank for International Settlements (BIS) has played a significant role in the momentous changes the international monetary and financial system has undergone over the past half century. This book offers a key contribution to understanding these changes. It explores the rise of the emerging market economies, the resulting shifts in the governance of the international financial system, and the role of central bank cooperation in this process. In this truly multidisciplinary effort, scholars from the fields of economics, history, political science and law unravel the most poignant episodes that marked this period,…
After I read this book, I immediately made a date for lunch with the author, where I presented him with a copy of my own, and we have been talking ever since!
The title tells you that we are both concerned with the same tension between money and empire, he as a historian and me as an economist, but intersecting in the history of economic thought. He tells a European story of the Geneva School and the neoliberal international political project, whereas I tell an American story of an internationalist minority view that takes to heart the central banker’s concern with the inherent instability of credit, and hence the necessity of explicitly managing money.
How to mesh the reality of global money with the reality of national polity?
George Louis Beer Prize Winner Wallace K. Ferguson Prize Finalist A Marginal Revolution Book of the Year
"A groundbreaking contribution...Intellectual history at its best." -Stephen Wertheim, Foreign Affairs
Neoliberals hate the state. Or do they? In the first intellectual history of neoliberal globalism, Quinn Slobodian follows a group of thinkers from the ashes of the Habsburg Empire to the creation of the World Trade Organization to show that neoliberalism emerged less to shrink government and abolish regulations than to redeploy them at a global level. It was a project that changed the world, but was also undermined time and again…
Reading was a childhood passion of mine. My mother was a librarian and got me interested in reading early in life. When John F. Kennedy was running for president and after his assassination, I became intensely interested in politics. In addition to reading history and political biographies, I consumed newspapers and television news. It is this background that I have drawn upon over the decades that has added value to my research.
It didn’t begin with Donald Trump. When the Republican Party lost five straight presidential elections during the 1930s and 1940s, three things happened: (1) Republicans came to believe that presidential elections are rigged; (2) Conspiracy theories arose and were believed; and (3) The presidency was elevated to cult-like status.
Long before Trump, each of these phenomena grew in importance. The John Birch Society and McCarthyism became powerful forces; Dwight D. Eisenhower was the first “personal president” to rise above the party; and the development of what Harry Truman called “the big lie,” where outrageous falsehoods came to be believed. Trump follows a pattern that was long established within the Republican Party. This is an untold story that resonates powerfully in the present.
Grand Old Unraveling: The Republican Party, Donald Trump, and the Rise of Authoritarianism
It didn't begin with Donald Trump. The unraveling of the Grand Old Party has been decades in the making. Since the time of FDR, the Republican Party has been home to conspiracy thinking, including a belief that lost elections were rigged. And when Republicans later won the White House, the party elevated their presidents to heroic status-a predisposition that eventually posed a threat to democracy. Building on his esteemed 2016 book, What Happened to the Republican Party?, John Kenneth White proposes to explain why this happened-not just the election of Trump but the authoritarian shift in the party as a…
