Fans pick 100 books like Promoting Global Monetary and Financial Stability

Folks familiar with the term “neoliberalism” usually describe it as the economic system that tries to unleash the market by getting the government out of the way. I like Globalists because it shows how unleashing the market demands that government gets in the way—of workers’ rights, movements for equality, and, most ominously, democracy itself. Since it’s impossible to understand fascism without tackling capitalism, a book explaining how we got to today’s market principles is vital.

I see this book as a history of the neoliberal economists who encouraged political leaders to use state violence and repression to unleash free trade and shape the global economy. Globalists tell the story of how modern capitalism developed into today’s vast landscape of inequality that makes a fertile ground for fascism and violent extremism to develop.

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. 

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.

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. 

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. 

This book not only offers an authoritative account of what the Federal Reserve has been up to since its founding in 1913 but also the rationale for why they did what they did. 

One particularly telling observation is made with respect to Arthur Burns, who was the Federal Reserve Chair during 1970-1978: “Burns always attributed [inflation] to nonmonetary sources.” Paul Volcker’s actions during 1979-1987 demonstrated how the restoration of monetary stability was a sine quo non for ending the 1970s inflationary spiral. No matter how necessary the Federal Reserve’s later massive 2020 monetary expansion may have been, it was imperative that this bulge in money also be unwound. 

A worrying element, however, is that, in the midst of all this, none of today’s Federal Reserve policymakers “ever mentions money.”

This choice is obvious and tough.

The book is notoriously difficult. However, it ranks with Darwin’s Origins of the Species, and Einstein’s General Theory of Relativity as among the most important and revolutionary books ever.

It’s no exaggeration to say that Keynes changed everything in the same way that Darwin and Einstein had. It will change the way you see the world if you make the substantial effort. Keynes argues that it is the organization of our economy around money that causes unemployment—not high wages or lazy workers.

Here’s my one sentence summary: firms only hire the number of workers they need to produce the output they expect to sell at a profit. If they cannot make money from hiring you, you are unemployed.

This is the story of the momentous wartime meetings in New Hampshire that mapped out the new institutions that were to guide the global economy through the Cold War and after: the International Monetary Fund and the World Bank. It is an absorbing intellectual battle between arrogant British aristocratic John Maynard Keynes and the scrappy US Treasury official Harry Dexter White. (Spoiler alert: White won, but spoiled his reputation by likely being a Soviet spy.)

I like this book especially due to its ability to illustrate money illusion in a very unconventional context.

Normally, money illusion means that people take nominal variables as proxy for real variables, which leads to suboptimal choice having real effects on the economy and affecting business cycle.

However, to my great surprise this book claims that even economic experts might suffer from some kind of money illusion, because they tend to misinterpret what is happening in the monetary system. This offers a very interesting explanation of recession and suggests that economists have not targeted adequate variables.

Unconventional suggestion to practice nominal GDP (gross domestic product) targeting instead of targeting the money supply is “outcome” of unique author´s vision called market monetarism. Inattention of policymakers to development of nominal GDP is blamed to be the direct cause of recession.