Selling England by the Pound

Before June hits, I figured it would be good to finish off the book reviews from my Economics courses last semester.  Three books, in declining order of how interesting they would be to a general reader.

1. Ahamed, Lords of Finance

A Pulitzer Prize winning book…about monetary policy.  Be still my beating heart.  The tabloid-worthy subtitle (“The Bankers Who Broke the World”) is suitably alarming.  First published in 2009, it undoubtedly earned sales, and perhaps even the Pulitzer, for coming out at the right time.  A book about how problems in the financial world caused a massive world-wide Depression…one can see why people in 2009 rushed out to buy a book about the 1930s.  The book itself is quite good.  Well-written, many good anecdotes, and a nice little morality tale.  The big lesson—stay away from the gold standard.  But, the lesson isn’t the reason to read this book.  This is a book for people who like history books; it is one of those books which shines a light on a relatively obscure set of people who are much less well-known that they should be.  When you hear the tales of the Great Depression in the popular press, you don’t often hear about Benjamin Strong; but you should.  And Montagu Norman?  Hjalmar Schacht? Emile Moreau?  These four men may have had a bigger impact on the events of 1930-1932 than any other four men, and yet try to find someone who can identify even one of those four.  The best recommendation for this book—it’s over 500 pages long, and I had several students tell me that they not only enjoyed it, but they read it over Spring Break.  When a book about monetary policy competes with the allures of the beaches of Puerto Rico…well, it must be good.

2. Eichengreen, Exorbitant Privilege

By way of contrast, I don’t think I had a single student tell me she liked this book.  I did hear from many who hated it.  It really doesn’t deserve opprobrium, but undergrads can be cruel.  The book is, as the subtitle puts it, about “The Rise and Fall of the Dollar and the Future of the International Monetary System.”  The subtitle is a bit wrong though—it should be “Possible Fall;” reports of the death of the dollar are greatly exaggerated.  This, like a previous Eichengreen book I once assigned to general disdain from the students (Globalizing Capital) (Lesson: don’t assign Eichengreen’s books to undergrads), suffers from the problem of trying to be an encyclopedia masquerading as a novel.  There isn’t a bit of trivia which Eichengreen doesn’t try to fit into the book, but the structure of the book is one long narrative story.  As a result, the book is dense, very dense.  In a way, it is admirable how much Eichengreen can compress a wealth of detail.  But, that doesn’t make the book the most excellent type of book to read on a beach.

3. Mehrling, The New Lombard Street

A book for those who want the nitty-gritty of monetary policy.  It’s good for what it does, but it presents a rather novel take on recent Fed activities in a sort of off-hand, this-is-obviously-true, manner.  Arguing that the Fed has moved from being the lender of last resort to an insurer of last resort is a clever little rhetorical ploy, and makes for a nice little thought experiment, but on the bigger question, ”Is it true?,” the jury is still out. I find it hard to have Mehrling's certainty that the actions of a clearly panicked Fed in 2008 are a harbinger of things to come.  That being said, not a bad book, just not one destined to show up in many people’s bedside reading stack.

And thus completes the reviews for my economics courses in the Spring.  (I still have one more book from my tutorial to go.)  This, incidentally is leaving me with a bit of an odd feeling.  I recently took an administrative job in the college for next year, so I won’t be assigning any economics books next year.  It’s been so long since I wasn’t teaching an economics course, I wonder how many economics books I will read in the next year.  I really have no idea.  This is seriously uncharted waters.

The last time I wasn’t teaching economics was shortly after the end of the era this song is imitating.  Lily introduced me to Gyote last night.  The song linked above sounds exactly like Sting singing on one of the early albums by Genesis (before Phil Collins took the band in the all-pop, all-the-time direction).  (Curiously, there is another song on the same album which sounds like Genesis after Phil Collins destroyed the band (think: Invisible Touch).  I won't link to that song for Humanitarian reasons.)