MONEY: Whence It Came, Where It Went

by John Kenneth Galbraith ‧ RELEASE DATE: Sept. 3, 1975

A catchy little title, you must admit, for an economic history primarily concerned with macromanagement, currency stabilization and the vicissitudes of Gresham's Law--but then Professor Galbraith has always prided himself on his style. With characteristic wit and clarity he suggests that while good money may indeed be driven out by the bad, it is political suicide to assume that the suckers left holding the bad will take it lying down. He begins his lesson with the invention of coinage but proceeds rapidly to home base--to the tobacco currency of the pre-Revolutionary colonies, then to a defense of the ""worthless"" Continental as the means which, like the later assignat, financed a great war. Likewise, his chronicle of domestic banking pays tribute to the wildcat banks which, despite--or because of--shaky reserve assets, opened the West. He covers international developments from the establishment of the English central bank through the infamous Weimar inflation, the financing of the World Wars abroad, the rise of Keynes and the Bretton Woods agreement--but his eye is always on the ball which is the future of U.S. decision-making. His six imperatives for our historically unique damned-if-you-do, damned-if-you-don't inflation cum recession gear an egalitarian getting and spending (revised fiscal policy, wage and price controls, planning for resources, floating exchange rates) to enlightened social policy. This is a quintessential liberal view of the evolution and status of capitalist institutions. (The existence of Marxian theory is dismissed as ""a less relevant menace"" than Keynes to the hegemony of old money.) In a time of conservative backlash, Galbraith and ideas like his--that cupidity is the root of hard-money policy, that money is as real as its social use--are in exile from Washington if not the vest pocket of the university. These compromise measures will be as scrupulously ignored in the first place as they will be avidly read in the second. For the lay reader, there is no more current, more judicious or more entertaining a perspective than Professor Galbraith's latest paper on the disposition of wealth within the free enterprise system.

Pub Date: Sept. 3, 1975

ISBN: N/A

Page Count: -

Publisher: Houghton Mifflin

Review Posted Online: N/A

Kirkus Reviews Issue: Sept. 1, 1975

Categories: NONFICTION