Winner of the Spear’s Best Business Book Award
Longlisted for the 2012 Financial Times and Goldman Sachs Business Book of the Year Award
For the past forty years western economies have splurged on debt. Now, as the reality dawns that many debts cannot be repaid, we find ourselves again in crisis. But the oncoming defaults have a time-worn place in our economic history. As with the crises in the 1930s and 1970s, governments will fall, currencies will lose their value, and new systems will emerge. Just as Britain set the terms of the international system in the nineteenth century, and America in the twentieth century, a new system will be set by today’s creditors in China and the Middle East. In the process, rich will be pitted against poor, young against old, public sector workers against taxpayers and one country against another.
In Paper Promises, Economist columnist Philip Coggan helps us to understand the origins of this mess and how it will affect the new global economy by explaining how our attitudes towards debt have changed throughout history, and how they may be about to change again.
Excessive Debt or the Illusion of Wealth Philip Coggan explores with much clarity the different cycles in which money and debt have expanded. Mr. Coggan reminds his audience that money is concomitantly a medium of exchange, a unit of account, and a store of value. Two of these monetary roles – the means of exchange and store of value – lie at the heart of the ongoing struggle between creditors and debtors.Starting in the United Kingdom in the late eighteenth century, the Industrial Revolution resulted into accelerated…
Superb book about money, debt and the challenges to come Paper Promises (2011) by Phillip Coggan is a masterful study of money and debt. Coggan worked at the Financial Times for 20 years and now writes at The Economist. He has written a number of books on finance that are all highly regarded. The book looks at the history of money and credit and concentrates on the post industrial revolution world where credit and fiat currency rapidly expanded.The book starts with a brief look at money in history before moving the C19 and then C20 and most of…
Great summary of past market turmoil with the credit crunch. He does a great job of bringing together opposing views, so that a reader can hear BOTH sides of an argument and gain some perspective on why the markets got so out of tune. (I don’t enjoy the “I’m right and I saw it coming” type of books. Instead, the author has a perspective, but importantly gives opposing views and quotes, developing an understanding of why otherwise rational people and investors go off-track in a…