Money : whence it came, where it went

John Kenneth Galbraith was one of the best writers on economics. You don't agree with him to thoroughly enjoy his books. This is one of his best. JKG had a great sense of humor and didn't take himself seriously. He was serious about economics. I have one caution: Always read the preface. If he intended to let his personal beliefs enter into the book, that's where he'd tell you.

An excellent book in good condition. If you want to understand money this is a good place to start. However, this book requires some background for its full appreciation e.g. the first humorous story in the book requires you to know who the 37th President of the USA was and to have some idea of his relationship to Charles G. Rebozo.

As an average reader, and not an economist, this is the best book that I have found so far in trying to get an understanding of money. It is an economics book and a history book. Money is a confusing subject but Mr. Galbraith does a wonderful job in trying to simply the subject. In our current economic situation, I think Mr. Galbraith will be re-established as the man with the correct understanding of how things really work in our economic world. I was writing my personal page by page analysis of this book but my hard drive died and I lost the whole thing. But I still consider my time well spent. I have read this book twice, and I may read it one more time. I'm sure that if Mr. Galbraith were alive today, President Obama would be eagerly seeking consultation with him. This book was published in 1975 so we are dealing with history in this book. But what goes around comes around and this book is as applicable today as it was in 1975. If you can find a copy - get one. You won't regret it. Somebody should republished this book along with Mr. Galbraith's "The Great Crash 1929." These are two gems for understanding today dilemma. Books written by Richard Noble - The Hobo Philosopher: "Hobo-ing America: A Workingman's Tour of the U.S.A.." "A Summer with Charlie" "A Little Something: Poetry and Prose" "Honor Thy Father and Thy Mother" "The Eastpointer" Selections from award winning column.

Although originally published in 1975 by John Kenneth Galbraith (and republished in 2001) this is a great foundational discussion from someone who was closer to the depression than we are today. This work is helpful for a reader to understand how we got to where we are today with money and banks and the governmental systems and institutions. First discussed is a brief history of how money developed and what it is (a medium of exchange that has taken many forms throughout history. page 5). "Attitudes towards money proceed in long cyclical swings. ...nothing, not even inflation, is permanent. ... that the pursuit of money...is capable of inducing not alone bizarre but repely perverse behavior." (page 3). The root of panics and the gold standard are discussed from his perspective - which I won't go into since each theme has supporters and detractors - however, another perspective is helpful. Galbraith discusses Keynes and how fiscal policy (expenditures through the Federal budget) helps in certain economic times when some method of making sure money is spent, not simply made available for borrowing (at times even though money is available to borrow, it is not - and we see that tendency in 2008). He also discusses four serious flaws to fiscal policy in chapter six - something policy makers should keep in mind during this economic cycle in the early years of the 21st Century. Monetary policy (that of the Fed and the Federal Open Market Committee as examples) are discussed along with Milton Friedman. Galbraith wrote in 1975 at a time when the world had not yet experienced a complete cyclic shift between policies - they ended the fiscal stimulus period and had not yet ended a monetary stimulus period - as we have today. We are back to a fiscal stimulus period. There is a brief and interesting discussion about the human tendency for regulators and politicians to see the train wreck coming, but hesitate to call alarm and be singularly blamed for the ensuing train wreck; better to share the blame with many afterwards, or better yet have that blame shifted somewhere else. Unfortunately, the same is true today as it was then. My humble conclusion is that economic cycles are just that, cyclical. Both types of policies, fiscal and monetary, have their time when their strengths are needed. However, both types of policies have their weaknesses as well. It would be wise of policy makers to recognize where we are in the cycle and when inflection points matter in order to prevent economic stress due to the extremes of letting a policy go on too long. Both appear to be good policy tools at different times. The challenge is recognizing when one policy will make matters worse if continued, and to transition to the other policy in time to mute the effects of the current policy carried to an extreme in order to encourage the other policy to pick up where the previous leaves off. Otherwise, we are doomed to repeat the cyclical boom and bust cycles of overextension o

This is JKG holding forth on that most perennially fascinating of topics. The subtitle ("Whence it Came, Where it Went") may bear a relation to the question on everybody's mind during the early and mid-seventies: why is our money behaving so badly? "In the twenty years before the founding of the [Federal Reserve] System there were 1748 bank suspensions; in the twenty years after it ended the anarchy of unstable private banking, there were 15,502."(p144) "...the Democrats...could authorize it [the central bank] without being suspected of evil."(p239) "...the [German] inflation of 1923, with its euthanasia of the "rentier" class...had almost certainly a far greater [than the 1945 inflation] effect on relative wealth. ...The loss of assets makes a deep impression on an impressionable class of people. The loss of jobs is accepted more philosophically."(p303/304) "... the higher oil price [in 1973] was considered highly inflationary ... in fact, it was deflationary ... the revenues... accumulated in unspent balances. Thus they represented a withdrawal from current purchasing power..."(p363) (The rest of the paragraph is relevant. The basic point is that the oil producers took money out of circulation, since they made it far faster than they could spend it.)" And the piece de resistence: "To see economic policy as a problem of choice between rival ideologies is the greatest error of our time."(p368)MONEYOK, do I have your attention? Well, this book will not demystify money - like love it is resistant to that, but like love we can't let it go. And its progress through our culture is a fascination, attended by hopes, frauds, inventions, and, not least, desperate invocations.Galbraith is a writer of enormous wit, intelligence, learning, and sympathy. But he is, of course, a liberal, so to many anything he says will be suspected as not arising out of a proper deference to the efficacy of pure market forces. Just as daunting, his strong, ironical style requires a neophyte a few pages to adjust to syntax shock. Once comfortable with the language, though, one can sit back and enjoy the colorful cavalcade of rogues and fools, madmen and prophets, as they invent and wreck institutions, impoverish whole nations, and pay for wars with worthless paper.A Harvard economist, a former ambassador, and a leading Keynesian in the Roosevelt administration, John Kenneth Galbraith is at home in the twentieth century's public life as few others are, and has a firm intellectual grasp of his sometimes slippery subject. This book is a witty, but intellectually serious, history of a concept absolutely central to what we are pleased to call modern life, and how it has grown and changed from exchanging pieces of something shiny to now encompass powerful banks, puzzling foreign exchange markets, and tottering Ponzi schemes. Vast frauds separated by centuries appeal to the same base motives and use the same crude stratagems to separate us from our bit of money in hopes we