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, the reality dawns that many debts cannot be repaid. But the oncoming defaults have a time-worn place in our economic history. As with 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. To understand the origins of this mess and how it will affect the new global economy, Coggan shows us how our attitudes toward debt have changed throughout history?and how they may be about to change again.
Paper Promises: Debt, Money, and the New World Order
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The Dark Side of Debt As our current economic system is melting slowly away, along with a decade-long rise of the price of gold, naturally more and more books are appearing which try to examine our past economic systems and the role gold used to have in them.Paper Promises is a very well written and unbiased economic history covering different monetary systems from the classic gold standard through Bretton Woods to our current fiat system. In some sense, this book doesn’t offer any new information to…
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…