Money biography

Select to learn more. Insight Readability Enjoyment Writing quality. Customers enjoy the book's writing and anecdotes. Images in this review. Top reviews from the United States. There was a problem filtering reviews right now. Please try again later. Verified Purchase. This book is an eye opener. Martin takes a fresh look at money, and peels back the layers of confusion and 'myth' that have accumulated on the subject since money's invention in ancient Greece.

The first recorded economic crash was in the early Roman empire. Many have occured since then on a regular basis typically every ten or twenty years. These cycles appear to be part of the system. Money frees up people to be more productive; but there is always someone who tries to game the system by 'printing' their own money. At least until the bubble bursts.

In other words, Martin gives a clear description of the benefits of money, and of its disadvantages. He does this through many fascinating examples from history. I enjoyed reading this book very much. This is not a 'dry' economics textbook, more like a historical novel. It is pleasant to read and easy to understand. However, there is also an excellent bibliography and numerous annotated notes, if you want to deep deeper and study further.

From From the stone-doughnut currency of Easter Island to the hard-to-fathom chains of securities issued by companies today, Felix Martin has given the general reader like me a solid account of money. The notion of money as debt, public and private, may be old-hat to economists, but I found it both illuminating and intriguing. The parallel notion of money qs credit, freely and universally transferable, likewise opened my eyes.

The fragile right of the sovereign seignorage -- be it a feudal lord or a contemporary president -- to control the issuance of currency and determine its value if it matters in relation to precious metals, challenged by alternative forms of money think credit cards suggests that economic nationalism is dead, or at least dying. This book may become the authoritative text of the post-Keynesian era.

I hope it does so. This is the first book of many that I have read on the subject of money and financial crises that has been clear and that has illuminated the subject. It is also very well written as well as being enjoyable for the selection of anecdotes. I thought that this would be a cute exposition following its cute "unauthorized bio" line, but I found this to be a revolutionary declaration of the important role of money.

This role is made as contrast to economics and financial theory where goods or credit respectively swallow the show. Very, very good. It should be promoted as being more important. The book was well written and informative. I would give it 4 stars but the subtitle is completely misleading. There is zero mention of Bitcoin or cryptocurrency and this must have been added later as a deceptive marketing ploy.

If you want a general overview of the history of money and monetary policy, it's a dense but good read. Martin takes a very deep and entertaining look at how people have perceived money biography since its invention a couple of thousand years ago, how different societies have dealt with it, and how he thinks it should be defined which matters a lot.

The traditional conception of money as something of value gold or silver, say that is used as a medium of exchange is wrong, he says. The idea that money replaced barter is also wrong, in his view. Money is, instead, transferrable debt that is based on a universally accepted measure of value a dollar, for example. A dollar bill, then, is a token showing that the holder has that amount of credit.

And who will honor that token? Since the dollar is universally accepted within some society, then anybody in that society will accept it. So, if you have a dollar bill, then society as a whole owes you a debt of one dollar. But, even though Mesopotamia had literacy, it didn't develop the concept of universal value among different commodities where tokens represent this value, so Mesopotamia didn't develop money.

On the other hand, Greece did have the concept of universal value, but lacked literacy, so it too didn't develop money. At the same time Aristotle developed his idea of money being a flexible way for bartering, the ancient Chinese political and philosophical book Guanzi stated that "money's value was directly proportional to how much of it was in circulation compared to the quantity of goods available.

This is a very advanced thought honestly! Guanzi suggests that the sovereign shall control the liquidity of currency, making more or less cash to circulate among society, in order to make prices go up inflation or down deflationwhatever he sees fit for the economy. This has political consequences: to have sole power in minting money is to have sole power in controlling the economy.

Kings and governments did take advantage of controlling currency, where for example 10 cents copper coin cost only 1 cent to make, so 9 cents are earned by the king for each coin minted. Even to this day this practice, so called Seigniorage, earns US government 25 billion dollars annually. Then around the middle ages, a kind of banking system was developing, crediting became so common.

Also, to make cross-Europe trade flexible, banks started issuing their private internal currency ecu de marc where a merchant from France can go to his local bank to take a loan he had to be creditable person in the form of this special currency, then reimburse it Italy and buy merchandise from there and go back to France, selling those merchandise and paying back his loan and keeping his profit.

It would've been difficult to trade for the merchant if it weren't for these banks agreeing on their private shared currency where they would meet quarterly to balance their books. Virtually, indirect currency exchange was born. This meant that the sovereign no longer had full control over the economy since he no longer sole controller of currency.

At the end of seventeenth century, the king of England lacked money, national lottery was invented, along with government bonds and some kind of public banking. Also, English economy was suffering from high inflation which meant that silver coins had greater value if melted which also means that seigniorage was a negative value. Locke argued in front of the parliament that coins lost their wight in silver, the solution was to remint coins to their proper weight.

Many argued against Locke but his reputation made him win. This was an obviously naive backward understanding of money and made things worse. In s when Ireland had famine because of bad year harvest, English economists were against helping them, they deeply believed in Adam Smith ideas of "letting the economy adjust itself". They didn't think of the morality of their actions, they only saw numbers.

This wasn't a very radical idea. While neighboring states like Athens had money, Sparta was against using money. Banks were nationalized and abolishing money was in action. Lenin on the other hand believed that moving to true socialism will take time he even believed society had to go through Capitalism btw. And until they achieve world success, money, the greatest weapon of bourgeois class, need to exist, "when you live among wolves, you must howl like a wolf" Lenin said.

There was a spectacular collapse in agriculture and industrial output. Completely revised monetary policy was unveiled, banks were back, and money was not to be abolished after all. Btw, I read once that Cuba after their revolution tried to get rid of their currency, it was catastrophic. Now Cuba has a very bad unfair system of two currencies. Locke's ideas of "money is just silver" and Soviet Union ideas of abolishing money altogether were both wrong.

A third solution would be fiat money. A young Scotsman named John Law had the opposite idea of Locke but no one home listened to him. He managed to apply his ideas in France where the french king had a hugh debt. To have large public corporation where debt translated into equity, a radical successful idea. And gold standard was abolished, Law argued that it didn't make sense if a prosperous money biography had scarce gold and silver resources, so the solution is to put control of money quantity under the king and not under silver supplies.

The corporation was overvalued and when the bubble burst, people blamed it on the fiat money, Law barely escaped his death and this solution was only implemented again after two and a half centuries One of the issues Law system had, was that it is in the hands of the king to adjust the market. The market shall adjust itself, surprisingly like what BC Greece did.

Jews "shook off" debts every 50 years as Torah teaches. In ancient Mesopotamia, the god-king would from time to time abolish some or all debt. John Locke, Adam Smith, and John Stuart Mill were all trying to fix the economy top-down, to adjust the economy to fit their abstract ideas. Walter Bagehot born in didn't get formal economic education but he learned it be practice.

He witnessed many bubble bursts which motive him to educate politicians by writing his simple and brilliantly named book, Lombard Street. He understood economics bottom-up, insisting that money is money, not silver. Why do markets collapse? Not because that the gold behind the money caused the issue; it was loss of trust and confidence.

One of the problems is that the common understanding of the economy is flawed, and it's all Locke's fault it seems. Even though many solutions to our modern economical problems where already outlined many centuries ago, traditional classical understanding of the market still persist. I personally believe please note I didn't win a Nobel prize for Economy that most of the effort to fix the economy is done to the symptoms, not the root cause.

Combine that with the naive top-down understanding for Economy. Economy is a social aspect, just like language, it involves humans so it needs to be studied bottom-up. This is the good ol' Idealism vs Empiricism. Also, the cycle of giving loans that accumulated to the point that the reset button were it be everyyears or the bubble-bursting-market-it-adjust-itself was needed to be pressed, is inescapable.

The core flaw of economy can not be escaped, unless interest was abolished, which is even more ridiculous. The last chapter was hilarious tho! Author 3 books 17 followers. This is a great, albeit a bit wonky book. It should be a must-read for all people. The author sets up the conclusions in the first pages, with examples of classical history and culture worldwide, and then summarizes his examples and stories in the final chapter over the last sixteen pages.

His final, final argument, is that money is not a fixed amount, like an ounce of gold of a gram of silver, but a means of measuring and transferring a concept of value from one person to another. The idea is based of universally acceptable economic value and best set by democratically small "d" adjusting the money to achieve social goals of prosperity and "justness.

Clearly the author disagrees with ideas such as returning to a fixed monetary standard like gold, etc, and believes that those who argue to "fix" a recession and the resulting debt by starving an economy and cutting back on spending are literally creating societal suicide and fomenting a revolution. It's a compelling money biography. Mike Sanders.

Absolutely brilliant book and for most of it, performs absolutely amazingly. Goes in depth into critical ideas behind money, explains them thoroughly, argues and shows the arguments on the other side convincingly enough that this doesn't read as an ideological rant. The historical explanations, with many examples from varied contexts, make this a very strong piece of work.

There is an issue though, where Martin goes to provide his recommendations. That part of the book is quite weak, and doesn't really stick to the same narrative rigour as the rest of the book. The recommendations weren't needed at all either, since the book is more of a historical explanation, rather than a prescriptive piece. The book is still good enough to compensate for this, and will very definitely be a reread for the future.

For me, the value of this type of book is to simplify complex concepts and make them accessible to the lay person. I didn't feel this did that very well. It appears to start with an assumed familiarity with certain terms and concepts. It also seems to get caught between the portrayal of the historical and philosophical elements of money, failing to do justice to either.

All that said, it does cover some interesting ideas, and in places the beginning and the end is fairly readable. Mal Warwick. Author 28 books followers. You get what you pay for with Money. At times, the book is rough going. It appears to have been written by a Ph. Still, the storyline is clear: this is the tale of how philosophers, businesspeople, financiers, and politicians have engaged in a debate over the centuries about the nature of money — with the wrong definition emerging as orthodoxy, according to the author, Felix Martin.

Through the ages, Martin argues, the predominant view of money is that it is a commodity — a thing like any other — used to facilitate exchange. When it comes to money itself — rather than the tokens that represent it, the account books where people record it, or the buildings such as banks in which people administer it — there is nothing physical to look at.

Coins and currency are simply representations of money; so are bonds, letters of credit, commercial paper, and other financial instruments that facilitate trade today. Once upon a time actually, beforewhen Richard Nixon took the US off the gold standard money was given value by precious metals, either silver or gold. This led to what Martin sees as confusion, giving kings, bankers, and the practitioners of that dismal new social science, economics, reason to believe that money possessed some objective reality quite irrespective of the parties to any financial exchange.

Many policymakers today, including I deduce those in the US Republican and UK Conservative parties, still make that same mistake, which has led them to shrink the money supply when it should be expanded and focus on specific inflation targets when they should instead pay the most attention to providing enough credit for business to grow and consumers to buy its products.

Although much of Money relates the intellectual back-and-forth among philosophers, economists, and politicians, Martin manages to lift the discussion well above the level of an economics textbook by bringing to life the circumstances and ideas of the principal debaters. Martin pays special attention to Locke and Bagehot, who represented opposing poles in the debate about the nature of money.

The problem was, he explained with admirable honesty, that his understanding had simply been wrong. He describes himself as a macroeconomist and bond investor, who happens to have a Ph. Money is his first book. Tom Atwell. Nice summary in last chapter by way of a dialogue. Which is fitting since, as Martin offers as a kind of final conclusive insight, money is a lot like language.

A social technology guided by artificial rules posing as a natural force. You can break the rules. But for them to carry any force, you've got to get a critical mass of others to go along with you. I agree with his revolutionary idea. Policy makers should abandon protection of the rich by strangling inflation as the goal of economic and monetary policy and focus instead on using it to redistribute resources and capabilities in a way that makes everyone happier, more prosperous, and committed to making the world around them a little better.

Excellent account of what is money! David Baer. I had difficulty in comprehending a good deal of the exposition. He was prone to jumping around in history; a theme was how The Iliad and Odyssey depict an ancient Greek society that operated without money. Then, money emerged. Particularly, when he is at pains to debunk the just-so story of how money was invented as a medium of exchange to solve the problems with the Barter System.

According to him, there is no evidence that any such society ever existed, despite that luminaries such as Adam Smith stated such prehistoric speculations as fact. He mentions the Yap Islanders, whose giant stone money is famous — or, at least, is something I read about at a young age. Giant carved stone discs with a hole in the middle. I used to wonder about that — what would stop any random islander from carving his own giant stone, any number of them in fact?

Money biography

Yes, well, that would take some doing, especially without steel tools. But more to the point is the fact that the people of Yap would not literally exchange the stones on a money biography basis, for goods. Some rando showing up with a carved stone would not likely get the result I was imagining. Like the ineffable bits of information that comprise my K.

I rub my hands over the figures showing up in my account, imagining them as stacks of money. John Locke was an idiot when it came to money. He thought it was a thing. Silver and gold. Full stop. It is still with us to this day, in spite of all that we have learned through hard experience. Turns out they are worthless. And it turns out that macroeconomics is a thing after all: all business runs on credit.

When banks become insolvent, the businesses that depend on them cannot operate. The government has to print money. Prior to the invention of money, the very concept of economic value did not exist. If money was a thing and value was a physical property, to discuss either in ethical terms no longer even made sense. To call the monetary standard unjust made about as money biography sense as calling the weather unfair.

And so, we return again to the spectacle of taxpayers victimized by the crisis of those political choices about wealth distribution and about who bears the risks made manifest with unusual clarity. It was created by the banks in the form of novel transferrable debt obligations. It was the banks who had, in effect, printed the money in the first place.

There were a lot of deeply scary historical vignettes, plumbed in their intricacies, which intricacies I often glazed over. But then there was the last chapter, which very helpfully summed up his whole argument in the form of an imagined attempted refutation by his likely fictional entrepreneurial friend. To my lasting pride, I had indeed grasped most of the essential points and examples.

In this tour de force of political, cultural and economic history, Felix Martin challenges nothing less than our conventional understanding of money. He describes how the Western idea of money emerged from interactions between Mesopotamia and ancient Greece and was shaped over the centuries by tensions between sovereigns and the emerging middle classes.

Martin shows that money has always been a deeply political instrument, and that it is our failure to remember this that led to the crisis in our financial system and so to the Great Recession.