Scan barcode
A review by jtfales
Money: The True Story of a Made-Up Thing by Jacob Goldstein
4.0
Light, entertaining read that explores what societies have used for money throughout history. In doing so, it challenges our conception of modern money, identifying several types of monies in use in the USA currently, such as money market accounts. Great audiobook read by the author, a radio personality.
The central message that it is really BANKS that create our money was shocking to me and frankly, hard to wrap my head around. (I’m still trying.) The corollary that it is a wild and reckless policy to allow banks to claim to hold our money, but then lend multiple times that value out to people, also hit home.
Despite the high level analysis, I still managed to get lost in the discussion of the gold standard. Every change in monetary policy is good for creditors and bad for debtors or vice versa, and it’s hard to keep both parties interests in mind through the discussion.
I found the discussion of cryptocurrencies both too simple and not simple enough (as almost any discussion of crypto is doomed to be!). I was shocked the author didn’t even mention Ethereum, which gave people something to spend their crypto on (most notably NFTs), given his ultimate conclusion that Bitcoin has been a questionable innovation since it’s not very useful as a store of value or monetary exchange. The rise of *useful* cryptocurrency would have been more relevant to the book than than the play by play of how Bitcoin was invented, in my opinion.
The section at the very end about potential monetary reforms, while brief, was also fascinating.
The central message that it is really BANKS that create our money was shocking to me and frankly, hard to wrap my head around. (I’m still trying.) The corollary that it is a wild and reckless policy to allow banks to claim to hold our money, but then lend multiple times that value out to people, also hit home.
Despite the high level analysis, I still managed to get lost in the discussion of the gold standard. Every change in monetary policy is good for creditors and bad for debtors or vice versa, and it’s hard to keep both parties interests in mind through the discussion.
I found the discussion of cryptocurrencies both too simple and not simple enough (as almost any discussion of crypto is doomed to be!). I was shocked the author didn’t even mention Ethereum, which gave people something to spend their crypto on (most notably NFTs), given his ultimate conclusion that Bitcoin has been a questionable innovation since it’s not very useful as a store of value or monetary exchange. The rise of *useful* cryptocurrency would have been more relevant to the book than than the play by play of how Bitcoin was invented, in my opinion.
The section at the very end about potential monetary reforms, while brief, was also fascinating.