Money felix martin

“Felix Martin's remarkable book Money is economic history–and indeed cultural anthropology–with a difference...
Money: the Unauthorised Biography unfolds a panoramic secret history and explains the truth about money: what it is, where it comes from, and how it works.
This entertaining book offers one of the best explanations for the financial crisis that I have read.

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Money: The Unauthorised Biography

From ancient currency to Adam Smith, from the gold standard to shadow banking and the Great Recession: a sweeping historical epic that traces the development and evolution of one of humankind's greatest inventions.

What is money, and how does it work? In this tour de force of political, cultural and economic history, Felix Martin challenges nothing less than our conventional understanding of money. He describes how the Western idea of money emerged from interactions between Mesopotamia and ancient Greece and was shaped over the centuries by tensions between sovereigns and the emerging middle classes. He explores the extraordinary diversity of the world's monetary systems, from the Pacific island of Yap, where value was once measured by immovable stones, to the currency of today that exists solely on globally connected computer screens. Martin shows that money has always been a deeply political instrument, and that it is our failure to remember this that led to the crisis in our financial system and so to the Great Recession. He concludes wi

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Felix Martin tempts fate by opening with a quote from A. H. Quiggan: “Everyone, except an economist, knows what ‘money’ means.” Martin is a former World Bank economist, and at the end of this book, I sympathised with Quiggin.

After 260 pages of heavy-going argument, Martin concludes that money is: “not a thing but a social technology – a set of ideas and practices for organising society. To be precise (!) … [money] is a concept of universally applicable economic value.”

Earlier he states that: “Coins and currency … are useful tokens to record the underlying system of credit accounts and to implement the underlying process of clearing.”

Rather than providing a new and counter-intuitive insight into money, which he claims, there is analytical confusion.

A logical fallacy in much analysis of money is repeated here: because debts have often been used as money, it does not follow that money is a debt. Martin’s novel version of this fallacy is to argue that because we use credit accounts and a clearing system to