The History of Money

“The History of Money” by Jack Weatherford, Three Rivers Press, New York, 19971. Is a good introductory history. If you are serious about “money” do not let this be the last book you read. But if you are serious about money, this book is a fun easy read.2. Most of the book traces a path that is familiar to economic historians. I did like some of the details he provided about things like Croesus, who minted the first coinage, and Arab traders in China, who deposited their gold in return for official receipts that functioned like bearer notes.3. He might have expanded his treatment of renaissance banking and the emergence of fractional reserve banking considering the interrelationship of money to banking and banking to debt.4. His chapter on the Spanish gold based inflation might have served as a cautionary tale for those enamored of a commodity based currency or bullionism.5. His tales of the hyperinflation caused by irresponsible government printing of currency is an often told story. (In contrast the US mint sells currency to banks.)6. I wish he had spent more space on Bretton Woods, considering the role that it plays in money today.7. I would recommend his chapter on the “Cash Ghetto” to anyone, regardless of their interest in economics who is concerned about poverty.8. Weatherford devotes the end of the book to “Electronic Money” where he observes that, “Rather than being the means for the market, money has become the market.” (page 290)9. It was amusing to read, “The proponents of the so-called smart card hope that it will replace many of the routine cash payments that people make every day.” (page 238) Since the book was written in 1997, I wonder what Weatherford would say today.10. I would like to have seen his treatment of the financial meltdown in 2008.11. One thing that Weatherford can’t seem to get his mind around was the absence of a commodity basis for currency. It is hard to think that the money in the bank isn’t based on a pile of gold in a government vault somewhere; But is based rather upon the collateral that bank is financing. Many will note that overvalued collateral caused the collapse in 2008. Still, when a bank finances a new home, car, or factory the wealth of the bank has been increased by (not gold) but by a new home, car, or factory. What the system needs is an honest assessment of asset values – Remember Enron’s “mark to market” accounting – which may point to the need for more, not less regulation.12. A related topic is when government creates money through obligational authority. Government expenditures are paid by the Treasury through book entries much as any business would do. When the government pays to create a road, build a warship, educate a child, create a vaccine, predict a storm, or many of the other non-exclusionary things that government pays for, note that the government has created more national wealth, without putting more gold in a vault.

AP World History Review: The History of Money by Jack Weatherford is a good interpretation of the changes and continuities of money throughout many years. This book begins by talking about the differences between an African women during a normal day and a business man in Manhattan. It explains how the two people have two polar opposite days but they are both linked in one way, money. This book shows how money has created a unified world economy and how money is linked back to almost everything. The book gives an excellent description of how money has had many different impacts on the world and how different countries used different currencies for money. Overall I enjoyed this book, it showed how there was benefits and problems created from the developments in money. It takes you through the different civilizations over time. It begins in the by talking about the Aztec empire and how they had human sacrifices used to worship their Gods and then ate the people that were sacrificed. It also talks about how the Aztecs used chocolate as money and then using commodity money. Later on it moves into the development of silver and gold bars used as currencies and different countries have inflation occurring so the gold and silver bars lost their value. Then they created coins out of silver and gold used all over the world. Then the book leads you into the development of paper money and how there were ups and downs for this currency. The different countries had different currencies which made it difficult to trade. It explains the inflation occurring all over the world and then leads you into electronic money. This shows how credit cards led to debt and how people began to use checks.Overall I liked the book and how descriptive and detailed it went to explain the process of the development of money. The one problem I found with this book is that I felt he went off of topic quite a bit. He would start a new section talking about trade and war and then lead into how it relates to money a while later. It began to get confusing at times because everything was a different topic. I felt that the book flowed perfectly it went through each development slowly and told you all of the background information on it. I would recommend this book to other people who want to learn about the developments of money. Jack Weatherford wrote a good explanation of the history of money and how money was related to commerce, war, and how it linked the whole world together. In conclusion, this book is a good read if you are want to learn more about money across the world.

Anyone who uses money (all of us) should read this short, insightful book.Even if you believe it's the root of all evil, Weatherford traces the origins of money in commodity-based currencies, the eventual evolution into minted coins, the emergence of market trading systems, our modern monetary systems, and why money is right up there next to fire in terms of being one of humanity's most important, foundational inventions.Weatherford is a good writer and storyteller. The book moves along at a nice clip highlighting important details while never drifting into the weeds.I came away with many new insights and an appreciation for something so mundane yet essential to our contemporary society.

A clever review about the origin and development of money, and a usefull reminder of the abuses commited using it to finance the state. Important things that we must remember in order to know when the government is cheating us.

correspond à mes attentes, merci

The book is very good. Unfortunately it stops in the 90's. Very much change occurred since then in the area. An update would be required in order to make it really useful today.

I practically NEVER give anything or anyone the maximum or the minimum - I figure max and min are there to never use (what do we use when we find something better or worse)? But Weatherford's The History of Money rates the max.This book is about money; not economics, fiscal policy, or whatever, although they creep in a bit (but in a way that makes sense of them). I've read Galbraith's Money (damned good) but Weatherford brings the subject down the average, common sense level (i.e. you and me).Weatherford engagingly describes the myriad variations and forms that money has taken over 3000 years (and still does) but shows over and over the commonality throughout, inflation being the obvious example. And he does a masterful job of explaining - again in clearly understandable terms - how government policy, spinelessness, irresponsibility, or simple self-interest have profoundly affected economies through money control and manipulation.I very rarely read a book twice, but I will almost certainly re-read this one.Oh, one more thing. Even though he wrote in 1997, Weatherford predicts Bitcoins and cyber money almost perfectly. The man is a seer.One regret: he wrote in 1997 - I really, really wish he'd write a follow-up after the 2008 crash and ascent of cyber money.Loved the book.

One of the best books about the real history on money and everyone should read it, especially economists.

This is not a history of money, but an economic and social history, in which references to money pop up time and again.I liked the disdain for the persistent opportunism of governments and international authorities that the author lets often shine through the text. The book is particularly good when it discusses what happened after the gold standard was abandoned and the scarcity of precious metals ceased to act as an anchor on public deficits covered by printing more paper money. He shows how —under the present “finance-minister standard”— governments conjure up countless new reasons to inflate the money supply to finance their deficits. In the years since publication in 1997, the opportunistic deficit finance by money printing has probably even exceeded the author’s worst fears.I liked particularly the very entertaining description of Bolivia’s hyperinflation, because I was there, too, at the time . Episodes like the Bolivian story of the 1980s, or the German and Hungarian episodes post-WW 1 are always amusing to read. But wait till you get caught in one!Nowhere in the book is money defined. Sometimes, it is equated with cash (highly liquid means of payment); in other contexts it means “gross monetary assets” (cash plus claims on others), yet in others “net monetary assets” (gross monetary assets minus liabilities), in yet others it means total wealth, I.e. including real assets. Even frequent flyer points and food stamps are added to the money volume. The lack of a precise definition sometimes leads to misleading conclusions.The attentive reader will gradually distill from the stories that money serves three important functions: as a means of payment that furthers the division of labour, a store of value over time and a standard reference to compare the values of different things. The reader must also keep in mind that money can only fulfil these functions properly, if it is scarce, a point that often gets lost in the stories the author tells us. Only when he discusses the gold standard are we told that neither bankers nor politicians can be trusted with resisting the temptation of opportunistically inflating the money volume.The book is wide-ranging and wordy, which makes it entertaining, but also a bit cumbersome. For example, gruesome details of how Aztec priests dispatched fellow humans, how French bankers (the Knights Templar) were roasted on pyres in Paris in 1310 or how fast human flesh freezes at —30 degrees add nothing to an understanding of money.As always, it is dangerous for historians to end the story with a dose of futurology. The book was published in 1997, i.e. before the euro and before bitcoin. But the author speculates about ‘cyber money’ without acknowledging that it must be scarce. He talks instead about people taking control over what and how much money to create. And when he predicts that many sorts of money will be created in cyberspace, he ignores that the users of money face relatively high information and other transaction costs, so that many sorts of cash won’t survive.