It seems an age since I sat with Sir Mervyn King, retiring Bank of England governor, bemoaning the dearth of economic books, by contrast to the glut on business leadership (presumably written by people who knew all about it but found it too boring to practice).
We did not foresee the reversal about to take place. Since the banking crisis, masses of books arrive every week. Scanning them all would be incompatible with eating and sleeping, let alone anything else. Predictably, but irritatingly, each publisher’s publicist regards the latest emanation as unique, in ignorance not only of competitive titles but also of previous publications by their own author. So there is an element of chance in the books that have caught my attention.
Much the most entertaining is just called Money. The author, Felix Martin, refutes the textbook idea that money arose from the inconveniences of barter. It arose instead from the needs of monarchs and spread to the public. It was based on credit from the start, a fact obscured by the multiplicity of coins that have caught the attention of historians. Looking ahead, Martin would like to see a system of “narrow money”, in which banks would have to have enough cash (or its near equivalents) to redeem all deposits – something that every schoolboy believes to be the case until he learns differently.