NEW BOOK: THE CURRENCY OF POLITICS

Stefan Eich, The Currency of Politics: The Political Theory of Money from Aristotle to Keynes, Princeton University Press, 2022.

Akinobu Kuroda, A Global History of Money, Routledge, 2020.

We live in a time of unprecedented monetary innovation. Novel private monies like Bitcoin abound, because new technologies have made possible payment systems that bypass traditional banks. With the COVID-19 pandemic having expanded the frontier of unconventional monetary policies, central banks have been debating whether to create new digital currencies (CBDCs) of their own.

Never before has the future of money been more uncertain – and thus full of possibility. And yet a historical perspective can help us make sense of unfamiliar terrain, because the future of money may well resonate with its deep past.

I say deep past because it is important to look beyond the familiar notion of money that most people have. They imagine a national currency, issued solely by a state authority within territorial borders. In the United States, there is the dollar; in Japan, there is the yen; and in Europe, there is a great regional currency bloc. But this kind of money is a recent development, dating only to the nineteenth century, and arguably even later.

Before that, there were multiple and complementary monies, earmarked for different purposes. I might use one currency to pay taxes (rendering unto Caesar what is Caesar's) and another currency for reciprocal exchanges with my neighbors. Another currency would allow me to buy goods from some other part of the world, and yet another one would allow me to save wealth or invest capital in an enterprise.

We have all grown up in a world of homogenous national monies, where every territorial jurisdiction has just one currency that must be used for every monetary purpose – from exchange and keeping accounts to paying taxes and storing wealth. But money may someday return to its more historically typical heterogeneous baseline. It may already be happening.

To read the complete article, see:
The Adventures of Money (https://www.project-syndicate.org/onpoint/history-of-money-akinobu-kuroda-stefan-eich-by-jonathan-levy-2022-07)

On a related note, Kavan Ratnatunga of Sri Lanka writes:

To read the complete article, see:
https://timesofindia.indiatimes.com/blogs/toi-editorials/global-rupee-allowing-rupees-to-settle-foreign-trades-is-a-good-move-it-can-have-long-term-benefits/ (https://timesofindia.indiatimes.com/blogs/toi-editorials/global-rupee-allowing-rupees-to-settle-foreign-trades-is-a-good-move-it-can-have-long-term-benefits/)

To read the earlier E-Sylum article, see:
NEW BOOK: A GLOBAL HISTORY OF MONEY (https://www.coinbooks.org/v24/esylum_v24n43a03.html)

	NBS (coinbooks.org) Web