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Lombard Street, a Description of the Money Market.
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I remember in high school going to the gas pump and filling up during the oil crisis of the 1970s. Inflation was everywhere, but I had no idea what that was. I learned something about this in college and then in Congress as a legislative aide. I remember distinctly a conversation in Congress on how we were going to pay for these huge deficits that arose out of the Reagan tax cuts, all the while when inflation was peaking at that time. I had no idea. I then spent my PhD working in monetary economics to show the effect of inflation on the economy and have not stopped yet.
Friedman, a Nobel-winning former Economics professor, writes brilliantly and playfully, and students of economics love to read him. Yet he delves into the heart of the monetary problems that have been confronted historically. This he uses to shed light on how to conduct monetary policy today.
He ranges across the whole of American history. For example, the failure of the Continental Congress’s currency occurred since it was printed to finance the Revolutionary War when there was no federal government and no federal tax revenue. This led to the new US Constitution and the ability to raise taxes, and a stable currency that was backed by gold and silver.
With the Civil War, the US Treasury printed money called “greenbacks” and suspended conversion to gold and silver during the War, but re-established convertibility in 1879 at the pre-War rate. Friedman shows how this convertibility led to prolonged, hugely damaging deflation for…
"A lively, enlightening introduction to monetary history…from monetarism's most articulate apostle."—Kirkus Reviews"The Oliver Stone of economics" (Chicago Tribune), Nobel Prize laureate Milton Friedman makes clear once and for all that no one, from the local corner merchant to the Wall Street banker to the president of the United States, is immune from monetary economics. In Money Mischief, Friedman discusses the creation of value: from stones to feathers to gold. He outlines the central role of monetary theory and shows how it can act to ignite or deepen inflation. Through colorful historical episodes, he demonstrates the mischief that can result from…
I remember in high school going to the gas pump and filling up during the oil crisis of the 1970s. Inflation was everywhere, but I had no idea what that was. I learned something about this in college and then in Congress as a legislative aide. I remember distinctly a conversation in Congress on how we were going to pay for these huge deficits that arose out of the Reagan tax cuts, all the while when inflation was peaking at that time. I had no idea. I then spent my PhD working in monetary economics to show the effect of inflation on the economy and have not stopped yet.
Goodhart, a former head economist of the Bank of England, builds upon Bagehot to describe how modern central banks evolved to insure the private bank system.
Goodhart argues that regulations over private banks were unnecessary and that the shadow bank system (that had evolved since the Vietnam War era inflation drove banks away from the Federal Deposit Insurance Corporation in the US) would never go bankrupt. He argues that the investment banks always had sufficient reserves, so that increased regulation was undesirable.
The Crash of 2008 proved Goodhart wrong. Yet ironically, it is the exact same set of arguments that are being used today: banks do not need increased regulation since the Fed and Bank of England are now holding reserves, and private banks are also holding more reserves. Even the FDIC has argued against bringing investment banks into the FDIC system that is efficient, because it would involve increased…
The Evolution of Central Banks employs a wide range of historical evidence and reassesses current monetary analysis to argue that the development of non-profit-maximizing and noncompetitive central banks to supervise and regulate the commercial banking system fulfils a necessary and natural function. Goodhart surveys the case for free banking, examines the key role of the clearing house in the evolution of the central bank, and investigates bank expansion and fluctuation in the context of the clearing house mechanism. He concludes that it is the noncompetitive aspect of the central bank that is crucial to the performance of its role. Goodhart…
I remember in high school going to the gas pump and filling up during the oil crisis of the 1970s. Inflation was everywhere, but I had no idea what that was. I learned something about this in college and then in Congress as a legislative aide. I remember distinctly a conversation in Congress on how we were going to pay for these huge deficits that arose out of the Reagan tax cuts, all the while when inflation was peaking at that time. I had no idea. I then spent my PhD working in monetary economics to show the effect of inflation on the economy and have not stopped yet.
Bernholz, a renowned Swiss Economics professor, builds upon Friedman to provide an unparalleled view of how budget deficits and high government spending end up being financed by the “inflation tax” of printing money to cover the deficits.
Throughout history back some two thousand years, Bernholz describes ancient and modern monetary regimes based on metallic standards and fiat money unbacked by any metal. He analyzes how increased money supply causes moderate, high, and hyper-inflations throughout this history. He provides dozens of historical examples of money and inflation in times of crises including war.
Bernholz adds the dimension of how international exchange rates are affected during rising inflation and when deflation ultimately occurs. He shows how different “laws” regulate behavior, with good money driving out bad money until the bad money collapses in value and then good money is created or imported that drives out the bad money to its extinction. Bernholz…
Acclaim for the first edition: 'Peter Bernholz's book brings together his comprehensive studies of inflation from the fourth century to the present, showing their common elements and their differences. This is an impressive work that bankers, central bankers, economists and laymen can read with pleasure and profit. I recommend it highly.' - Allan H. Meltzer, The Hoover Institution, Stanford
Exploring the characteristics of inflations and comparing historical cases from Roman times up to the modern day, this book provides an in depth discussion of the subject. It analyses the high and moderate inflations caused by the inflationary bias of political…
I remember in high school going to the gas pump and filling up during the oil crisis of the 1970s. Inflation was everywhere, but I had no idea what that was. I learned something about this in college and then in Congress as a legislative aide. I remember distinctly a conversation in Congress on how we were going to pay for these huge deficits that arose out of the Reagan tax cuts, all the while when inflation was peaking at that time. I had no idea. I then spent my PhD working in monetary economics to show the effect of inflation on the economy and have not stopped yet.
King was the head of the Bank of England during the financial crisis of 2008. He declared full deposit insurance for the entire United Kingdom private banking system, with no deposit premiums required. This ended the run on the banks that spilled over into the streets of the UK during the crisis, when the Bank of England at first decided not to take care of Northern Rock, a private retail bank that was headed towards insolvency.
King provides a whimsical and sharp review of the private and central bank system before and after the crisis that builds very much on Charles Goodhart and Walter Bagehot. King laudably faults economists and the Economics profession for thinking that establishing negative real interest rates worldwide is the answer to central bank crises (in his newly added Introduction to the paperback edition of his 2016 hardback by the same name). Yet King sides with…
Something is wrong with our banking system. We all sense that, but Mervyn King knows it firsthand; his ten years at the helm of the Bank of England, including at the height of the financial crisis, revealed profound truths about the mechanisms of our capitalist society. In The End of Alchemy he offers us an essential work about the history and future of money and banking, the keys to modern finance.
The Industrial Revolution built the foundation of our modern capitalist age. Yet the flowering of technological innovations during that dynamic period relied on the widespread adoption of two much…
I’m a legal historian with a particular interest in eighteenth-century Britain and the United States. My research has investigated the history of arbitration, historical connections between law and politics, and changing attitudes to the rule of law. Since 2018, I’ve been a professor at Notre Dame Law School, where I teach courses in legal history, civil procedure, conflict of laws, and the rule of law.
Empire, Incorporated makes it clear that corporations mattered in shaping the British Empire. But how did they actually operate?
Virtuous Bankers offers a window into an ordinary workday at the Bank of England, one of the most important institutions in eighteenth-century England. In the process, the book provides new insights into the nature of public credit and the growth of the British state, as well as an engrossing introduction to everyday life in Georgian London.
An intimate account of the eighteenth-century Bank of England that shows how a private institution became "a great engine of state"
The eighteenth-century Bank of England was an institution that operated for the benefit of its shareholders-and yet came to be considered, as Adam Smith described it, "a great engine of state." In Virtuous Bankers, Anne Murphy explores how this private organization became the guardian of the public credit upon which Britain's economic and geopolitical power was based. Drawing on the voluminous and detailed minute books of a Committee of Inspection that examined the Bank's workings in 1783-84, Murphy frames…
I’ve always been attracted to the Gothic before I even knew the term. From watching The Munstersas a child to wanting to live in a haunted house and devouring classic Gothic novels like The Mysteries of Udolpho and Dracula, I’ve never been able to get enough of the Gothic. After fully exploring British Gothic in my book The Gothic Wanderer, I discovered the French Gothic tradition, which made me realize how universal the genre is. Everyone can relate to its themes of fear, death, loss, guilt, forgiveness, and redemption. On some level, we are all Gothic wanderers, trying to find meaning in what is too often a nightmarish world.
This 1844 novel has only been translated into English in an abridgement, but it was a tremendously popular novel in France. Féval capitalized on the bestselling novel The Mysteries of Paris by Eugène Sue by writing a novel with a similar title set in London. Later George W. M. Reynolds wrote another novel with the same name. What makes this novel stand out? Féval’s hero is an Irishman seeking revenge against the English who have wronged him. Disguising himself as the Marquis de Rio Santo, he worms his way into high society and sets about debauching ladies while plotting to blow up the Bank of England and destroy the British Empire. The novel would later inspire the creation ofThe Count of Monte Cristoand the character of Captain Nemo.
Excerpt from The Mysteries of London, or Revelations of the British Metropolis: Translated From the French
I'll be hanged if she will hear me, grumbled the captain. I shall appeal to the landlady Mistress Burnett; Mistress Burnett!
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I’m an economist who started out in stockbroking. But that felt like an exploitative industry and, looking for a more positive role, I moved to the consumer organisation Which? There, I cut my teeth helping people make the most of their money and then started my own freelance business. Along the way, I’ve worked with many clients (including financial regulators and the Open University where I now also teach), taken some of the exams financial advisers do and written 30 or so books on personal finance. The constant in my work is trying to empower individuals in the face of markets and systems that are often skewed against them.
US economist Frank Knight is credited with distinguishing uncertainty from risk back in 1921. Yet the two are often conflated.
Kay (an eminent economist) and King (a former Governor of the Bank of England) argue powerfully that the distinction does matter. They range widely across macroeconomics, politics, and consumer choices to show why reducing the future to a set of numbers (probabilities) creates a false – and often disastrous – illusion of power over future outcomes.
They argue that instead we should aim to make decisions that stand a reasonable chance of being robust against unknowable, as well as forecastable, paths that the future might take. That’s very much the ethos of my own books: building in resilience is a key part of successful personal financial planning.
Some uncertainties are resolvable. The insurance industry's actuarial tables and the gambler's roulette wheel both yield to the tools of probability theory. Most situations in life, however, involve a deeper kind of uncertainty, a radical uncertainty for which historical data provide no useful guidance to future outcomes. Radical uncertainty concerns events whose determinants are insufficiently understood for probabilities to be known or forecasting possible. Before President Barack Obama made the fateful decision to send in the Navy Seals, his advisers offered him wildly divergent estimates of the odds that Osama bin Laden would be in the Abbottabad compound. In 2000,…
I’m a Canadian political economist working in Australia as an Associate Professor in International Relations and Political Economy at the University of Wollongong, just south of Sydney. I’ve been fascinated by the history of capitalism and money since post-graduate school. Eventually I had some time to do a deep dive into the existing scholarly literature on money and have so far written two books on the topic and multiple articles. I hope you enjoy my book recommendations as much as I enjoyed reading them.
Desan’s work filled multiple gaps in my knowledge regarding the historical circumstances that contributed to modern money.
In my view, it is the best and most comprehensive book for anyone who wants to know how we arrived at current monetary arrangements. The research and writing are masterful, comprehensive, and there are many ‘oh my, I didn’t know that’ moments.
A real eye-opener and an essential read for anyone interested in money, finance, and the emergence of capitalism.
Easily the best and most authoritative book since Dickson’s The Financial Revolution In England – a must-read!
Money travels the modern world in disguise. It looks like a convention of human exchange - a commodity like gold or a medium like language. But its history reveals that money is a very different matter. It is an institution engineered by political communities to mark and mobilize resources. As societies change the way they create money, they change the market itself - along with the rules that structure it, the politics and ideas that shape it, and the benefits that flow from it. One particularly dramatic transformation in money's design brought capitalism to England. For centuries, the English government…
I’m a huge thriller fan, and I love finance. In fact, I worked in the industry for over twenty years. I have an MBA from Duke and have been the CEO of three different SEC/FINRA-registered broker-dealers. Unfortunately, I’ve found myself deep into a thriller with a financial component that turns out to be implausible, overly simplistic, or both. It breaks the narrative for me. With these books, that’s not a concern. Financial thriller aficionados unite!
As a finance guy, I had always heard of the BIS or Bank for International Settlements, but I had no idea what it did, how it worked, or its history.
Adam LeBor expertly explains in the Tower of Basel not only what and who the BIS is, but how they have manipulated and influenced the global economy for generations. Despite the bank's strong connections to the Third Reich during the 1930s, the BIS continues to dominate global finance today as the central bank for central banks.
Every two months, leaders from the most powerful central banks in the world including the Federal Reserve meet in Basil to chart a course for the world economy under a cloak of secrecy. Tower of Basel rips the veil from this clandestine organization and exposes dark forces few are aware of.
Tower of Basel is the first investigative history of the world's most secretive global financial institution. Based on extensive archival research in Switzerland, Britain, and the United States, and in-depth interviews with key decision-makers,including Paul Volcker, the former chairman of the US Federal Reserve Sir Mervyn King, governor of the Bank of England and former senior Bank for International Settlements managers and officials,Tower of Basel tells the inside story of the Bank for International Settlements (BIS): the central bankers' own bank.Created by the governors of the Bank of England and the Reichsbank in 1930, and protected by an international treaty,…
I'm an economic anthropologist and teach classes and conduct research in this area. Economic anthropology is different from economics in that it questions many of the things that economics takes for granted. For example, most economists assume that allocating goods through the market by buying and selling is the best way to organize human communities. Economic anthropologists have shown, in contrast, that many societies have been organized according to other exchange principles. In fact, some of the oldest communities in the world, such as Sumer and Babylon, based their economies around elaborate systems of redistribution, in which every citizen was guaranteed food shares.
Most of us think of economics and economic policy making the same way that we do about other scientific fields, such as physics or engineering. Like those sciences, economics uses numerical models and mathematical analysis to explain how the world works.
In contrast, this book reveals how economics is a very different kind of science from physics or engineering. Holmes shows how economists and economic policy-makers rely on language as much as, or even more than, numbers to achieve their desired policy goals.
Markets are artifacts of language - so Douglas R. Holmes argues in this deeply researched look at central banks and the people who run them. Working at the intersection of anthropology, linguistics, and economics, he shows how central bankers have been engaging in communicative experiments that predate the financial crisis and continue to be refined amid its unfolding turmoil - experiments that do not merely describe the economy, but actually create its distinctive features. Holmes examines the New York District Branch of the Federal Reserve, the European Central Bank, Deutsche Bundesbank, and the Bank of England, among others, and shows…
