War and Gold
A Five-Hundred-Year History of Empires, Adventures and Debt
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- USD 15.99
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- USD 15.99
Descripción editorial
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'Enormously entertaining' - Sunday Times
'Exhaustive and convincingly argued' - Observer
'A complicated story well told, from which financial lessons emerge naturally' - Financial Times
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A unique look at the financial world and its troubled history, from the disaster that befell Spain in the sixteenth century to the 2008 global financial crisis
In the sixteenth century, Spanish conquistadors discovered the New World. The vast quantities of gold and silver would make their country rich, yet the new wealth, which was plunged into multiple wars, would eventually lead to the economic ruin of their empire.
Here, historian and politician Kwasi Kwarteng shows that this moment in world history has been echoed many times, from the French Revolution to both World Wars, right up to the present day, when our own financial crisis saw many of our great nations slip into financial trouble. Kwarteng reveals a pattern of war-waging, financial debt and fluctuations between paper money and the gold standard, and creates a compelling study of the powerful relationship that has shaped the world as we know it, that between war and gold.
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'Searing ... Few stones are left unlifted in this study, the subtitle of which gives every clue as to its ambition' - Independent
PUBLISHERS WEEKLY
The title's implications aside, this is really a history of money thoroughly satisfying and remarkably accessible. Aiming to explain today's international financial turmoil, British historian and Conservative MP Kwarteng (Ghosts of Empire: Britain's Legacies in the Modern World) begins with Spain's conquest of America and its resultant bonanza of gold and silver. This bullion allowed governments to pay for wars and bolstered the European nation-state, yet it also fostered inflation, deficits, and a vast expansion of paper money the three sins of classical economics. Centuries of financial bedlam paused during the Victorian era of gold-based stable currency and balanced budgets, but two ruinous world wars resurrected deficits and unprecedented government spending. The 1944 Bretton Woods Agreement revived gold-based discipline, but its end in 1971 led to an explosion of credit, easy money, financial chicanery, the rise of Japan and the European Union(, the spectacular transformation of China, and the continued, if shaky, domination of a pugnacious, free-spending America and its dollar. While John Kenneth Galbraith's 1975 Money: Whence it Came, Where It Went remains the subject's touchstone, Kwarteng superbly brings that volume up to date in explaining the almost unexplainable.
