Saturday, December 3, 2011

More Reads

I enjoyed Currency Wars by Jim Rickards. Broadly, it tries to forecast the future of the dollar, by placing special emphasis on the currency wars of the past hundred years. The most compelling part for me was his description of a system that allows for flexibility in the money supply, to adjust to shocks, but that still maintains the stabilizing features of the gold standard. He argues that it's true the money supply was not expanded, when it should have been, during the Great Depression, making the situation worse -- but the blame placed with gold is misguided. Governments and central bankers were trying to maintain the pre-WW1 price, when they should have at least doubled it, to account for the money expansion that had occurred because of the war. Not something I've heard before. Otherwise, chapter 9 is useful for its summation of the biggest schools of economic thought.

Broken Money

The subtitle is Why Our Financial System is Failing Us and How We Can Make it Better , and the author is Lyn Alden (2023). I feel like I hav...