America's money machine: The story of the Federal Reserve

Groseclose is clearly on the conservative side of the aisle, and the back of my copy's cover contains a blurb attributed to Jesse Helms, April 23, 1979, where Helms compliments the author as "A scholar for whom I have great respect..." If that's enough to turn you off to the author, then you should probably stick with liberal authors like John Kenneth Galbraith. Galbraith's books such as A SHORT HISTORY OF FINANCIAL EUPHORIA or MONEY: WHENCE IT CAME, WHERE IT WENT will probably be better suited for you. Nevertheless, if one does not take offense to such conservative associations, then this book can still be approached as a useful body of information. It should be noted that Groseclose is much too professionally trained to rehash the sort of dishonest claptrap spouted by G. Edward Griffin, Gary Allen, Eustace Mullins, Alex Jones, David Icke and other Right-wing hucksters. Rather than portraying the creation of the Federal Reserve System in 1913 as some sort of clandestine coup d'etat carried out by the Illuminati/Freemasons/Rockefellers/Rothschilds/lizards or anything similar, Groseclose traces the history of how the crisis of 1907 raised broad public demands for a change which led after several years of back-and-forth political give-and-take to the creation of the Fed. Groseclose interprets the Crash of 1929 as the result of real uncertainties in the market, rather than something craftily planned by the Learned Elders of Zion. Nevertheless, his attempt to argue for a return to a gold standard was rather unpersuasive, in my opinion. In his concluding chapter Groseclose attributes to "many conservative economists" the idea "that an expanding economy needs a continually expanding money supply" and he attempts to equate this to the idea that "if a cloth merchant doubles his yardage sales he must double the number of yardsticks in his establishment." I found this to be a totally false comparison. The cloth merchant is not required to provide customers with a yardstick for every yard of cloth which they purchase. But every purchase within the standard economy requires some form of money to be paired with the good or service that is being received by one or more of the parties. Groseclose is here trying to push his gold standard argument, and at such points he can sound like a representative of the Mises Institute. Despite that drawback, Groseclose has produced a book which is vastly more reliable as a source of information than most of the rubbish which is in circulation right now. If you're taking an honest critical-minded interest in such monetary history then you will almost certainly find some use for this book.