The Power of Money; How Ideas about Money Shaped the Modern World Forrest Capie, Professor Emeritus of Economic History, Cass Business School and author of the modern History of the Bank of England writes: “Robert Pringle has written a book on money that is different from any other.” He “draws on a long life…
» Continue Reading
Review of Hostile Money
Currencies in Conflict
A review by Robert Pringle “The purposes of money are constant, the way it operates varies hugely” says Paul Wilson at the outset – and few authors have illustrated this as interestingly as he does. Impressively erudite, he never lets his command of detail hold up the story, so that the reader is swept up…
» Continue Reading
My Volcker anecdotes
The risk and reality of hubris
Of all my memories of Paul Volcker – I first met him in the early 1970s when we was UnderSecretary for Monetary Affairs at the US Treasury and I was editing The Banker – four are particularly persistent: 1. A remarkable passage in the introduction to a book I co-authored with the late Marjorie Deane….
» Continue Reading
How Ideas about Money Shaped the Modern World
The Power of Money
Hi there everybody Sorry to have been absent for so long. Actually I haven’t been bone idle. At least, not all the time, though I did manage to stow away on a couple of long cruises. But even then, surfing the ocean waves in my 40,000 ton dinghy, I’ve been thinking about that funny old…
» Continue Reading
The necessary illusionists
How money keeps its magic
Funny thing about money. It is supposed to be a bedrock of stability but it feeds on illusions. So much monetary policy relies on trickery. The elite know things that the unwashed masses do not. Such as money illusion. The success of devaluation rests on tricking the masses. But tell a central banker he or…
» Continue Reading