The paper aristocracy

This is an excellent and timely book about how an elite sect in our society, those that that can conterfeit money and get away with it, are manipulating our economy. A fresh and insightful perspective. It should be widely read.

What this book does is simply, clearly, eloquently and accurately describe what happens to any national currency that is not based on a full-reserve standard. In so doing it also describes what happens to a society that is held hostage by the ensuing fractional-reserve "money".The book was written in 1976. So much of its prophecy has come to pass in a quarter-century that there is no doubting Mr. Katz's dead-on accuracy. When his modest work was published there was no crack-cocaine epidemic. Violent crime was only beginning to escalate beyond prior statistical levels. There were no Junk Bond Kings. Leveraged corporate buy-outs and hostile takeovers had not yet made billionaires of the new "owners" while throwing millions of hard working trades-people out of work. There was no National Health Care Plan hovering benignly nearby. Panama, Desert Storm, Somalia, 9/11, Afghanistan and Desert Shield (to name a few) hadn't occurred. "Electronic cash" was an Orwellian concept. The Homeless had not yet appeared en masse. You could purchase a new car for less than three thousand dollars. And Social Security benefits alone provided a modest but adequate allowance for the majority of retirees."The Paper Aristocracy" explains in structured, unemotional content the real reasons why these and many other things have come about or changed for the worse. Mr. Katz should be required reading at every business school on every university campus in America. Perhaps the danger in that explains why this book is so very hard to obtain.