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Thursday, September 24, 2009

Financial bookshelf

In anticipation of future writings on the Fed and related subjects, I've acquired a growing collection of relevant books. Here's some recent, current and prospective reading:

Finished reading:

The Road Ahead for the Fed, multiple authors.

Getting Off Track: How Government Actions and Interventions Caused, Prolonged, and Worsened the Financial Crisis, by John B. Taylor.

The Case Against the Fed, by Murray Rothbard.

Partly read/in progress:

After the Fall: Saving Capitalism from Wall Street and Washington, by Nicole Gelinas.

Golden Fetters: The Gold Standard and the Great Depression, 1919-1939, by Barry Eichengreen.

Will read sometime soon:

In Fed We Trust: Ben Bernanke's War on the Great Panic, by David Wessel.

This Time is Different: Eight Centuries of Financial Folly, by Carmen N. Reinhart & Kenneth S. Rogoff.

A few thoughts: Eichengreen should be read by anyone who thinks we need the gold standard back, and has much to say on different types of gold standards. Rothbard presents much the same view as Ron Paul's End the Fed (about which readers may already know what I think) but, interestingly (and unlike Paul), ends with insistence on a gold-coin standard, seemingly in recognition that any kind of paper or electronic money merely backed by gold retains a credibility problem. Which leaves me to wonder how a modern economy could run on coins.