Gold: The Once and Future Money

by Nathan Lewis and Addison Wiggin

For most of the last three millennia, the world's commercial centers have used one or another variant of a gold standard. It should be one of the best understood of human institutions, but it's not. It's one of the worst understood, by both its advocates and detractors. Though it has been spurned by governments many times, this has never been due to a fault of gold to serve its duty, but because governments had other plans for their currencies beyond...

• Format: Hardcover
• Language: English
• ISBN: 0470047666
• ISBN13: 9780470047668
• Release Date: May 2007
• Publisher: Wiley
• Length: 447 Pages
• Weight: 1.55 lbs.
• Dimensions: 1.5" x 6.4" x 10.1"

Customer Reviews

The Most Important Book on Money

First, it is disheartening that there are not even more positive reviews on this book considering the times that we exist in with the Federal Reserve purposefully destroying the value of the dollar. This book is really important on understanding that a dollar is meant as a storage of value, not as a tool to inflict trade wars or inflate your way out of debt, therefore the gold standard is the best way of maintaining that storage value throughout time. This book advocates the correct gold standard which is pegging the dollar to a gold ounce, such as using a 10 year moving average of the number of dollars to exchange for a gold ounce to find an average price of dollars to gold or as an example say it takes $500 dollars to buy 1 ounce of gold. This allows the Federal Reserve to contract or expand the number of dollars in the economy to maintain that gold peg (less dollars are needed in a contracting economy and more dollars are needed in a growing economy to conduct transactions, both situations can be accommodated by maintaining the gold peg and the storage value of a dollar stays the same no matter what.) Those who advocate a "hard gold standard", aka using only gold coins, do not understand the gold standard and are usually just the constant doom and gloom types. So, I would strongly recommend this book if you want to know why a dollar is worth less than it was 30 years ago or now just 6 years ago or how monetary policy plays out across the world. This book uses the best teaching method, which teaches through economic history so you can learn what really caused the Asian Crisis of the 90's, or Japan's Stagnation, or our own hyperinflation of the 70's. Finally, if you really enjoyed this book I recommend reading The Way the World Works, 20th Anniversary Edition (Gateway Contemporary) this is the fiscal side of the government equation. If you read these two books, you will know more than 99% of the politicians who are supposed to be running our economy and will greatly help in making your own profitable investment decisions.

Good money is stable money ...

To read about gold is to read about the history of money. In this very well arranged book, the author present and enjoyable introduction to a central aspect of economics, money, from the differences between soft and hard money, the Gold standard, the uses of Taxes, Central Banking and the history of financial crises. Gold is indeed the most effective way to have stable money, meaning stable prices and this is repeated all along the book so you cannot forget it. Certainly this is a great book with lots of information and history, where you can understand the financial crisis that have devastated some countries economies, such as the '80 Latin America's crisis or the Asian crisis of '97, most of them problem related to floating currencies imbalance. There is also a very insightful explanation of what happened with Yugoslavia and the rol of the IMF and its "shock therapies" that have only worsened economies that needed their assistance in these moments of perils. Good money is stable money and maybe one day we will be back to it.

Great Timing for a Great Book On GOLD !!!

With the many serious problems in the housing markets , a falling U. S. dollar , rising commodity costs & rising inflation ; what better time for a very well written & easy to read book on the topic of mysterious GOLD !! So widely known , but so poorly understood and so much intentional or unintentional misinformation on the history & practical use for GOLD , this book is very well timed ! Not some boring economics book , you learn the Truth about gold and why it has always been an important part in the civilization of man ! A must read in these financially disturbing times !!!

A Must for Anyone Who Wants to Understand Monetary Policy

Nathan has written a masterpiece. He takes the concept of money to its very beginning and then uses easy to understand examples to educate us about the simplicity of monetary policy. This book is easy to understand by the average intelligent person. A person educated in the economics of the day may have difficulty fitting these simple and sound concepts into the complex fallacies that are taught in most economics classes today, but an open-minded, teachable economist will benefit greatly from Nathan's book.

Great book!

Let me start of by saying that it seems the last reviewer didn't even read the book! This book pushes a "type" of psuedo-gold standard, not the original gold standard. That said, the problems laid out by the reviewer don't even make sense under a true gold standard. A true gold standard does not mean that people use gold coins to purchase groceries or even homes. A gold standard, in the classical sense, means that there is no Federal Reserve or Central bank, at least not in its current form, and the dollar is DEFINED as a certain weight in gold. The monetary act of 1792 actually defined the dollar as 1 ounce of silver and then fixed the weights and measures of silver vs gold at 15 to 1. This was their error, so to speak. Even under a true gold standard, where no central bank exists, paper dollars do exist, as do checking accounts, savings accounts, et al. The process would work much like it does today with the exception that a paper dollar would be in the form of a receipt on gold. Private banks would hold your gold (some percentage of it) on reserve at the bank while issing you a deposit or savings account with the right to draw on the account in question. But I'm digressing --i don't have time to outline the true classical gold standard. This book espouses no such thing as the classical gold standard ---it pushes a psuedo gold standard which I describe below: It is a gold peg. Peg the dollar at a certain value of gold --say the current price of $660 per ounce. Currently the FED is responsible for setting interest rates, the discount rate directly and the FED funds rate indirectly through money supply adjustments. The authors of this book want the market to set the rate of interest, and the FED to be replaced with a currency board which has only one directive ---adjust the money supply in order to keep a constant value of dollar/gold ---at our $660 target. Interest rates would then be set by the market and money supply would be set by gold itself ---a much more stable form of money. This would be a pseudo gold standard ----as long as the market is open and free for gold exchange internationally, then there would be an automatical gold convertability for all people. The government would need to hold $0 gold because people could simply go out and convert their dollars into gold on the open market ---if they did on balance, the currency board would then need to decrease the supply of money in circulation in order to keep the peg (assuming all else stayed constant). If the USA went first, then all countries would follow ---this would create a one world currency, gold with dollar/yen/pound/euro simply representing different quantities of the same currency, as pennies, quarters, dimes, dollars, represent different quantities of the same currency now, the US dollar. This would provide automatic adjustment to imbalances of trade ---long discussion here. I recommend this book because of the history aspect and the understanding of gol