Chapter 1
Mademoiselle Zélie’s letter was printed as a footnote in Traictie de la Première Invention des Monnoies de Nicole Orseme, edited by M. L. Woloski. It was translated for me by Benoit Hochedez. The letter was made famous (among money nerds, at least) by Jevons. Details of the potlatch come from Davies.
The Caroline Humphrey quote on barter is from her article “Barter and Economic Disintegration,” published in the journal Man. David Graeber made much of the myth of barter in Debt: The First 5,000 Years. Norms of gift giving and reciprocity in traditional cultures have been widely discussed, perhaps most famously in Marcel Mauss’s The Gift. The details about different types of proto-money in different cultures come from Paul Einzig’s Primitive Money.
The idea that writing developed from clay tokens pressed into clay balls has been developed largely by the archaeologist Denise Schmandt-Besserat and is described for a general audience in her book How Writing Came About. I spoke with Robert Englund, professor emeritus at UCLA, to understand Mesopotamian accounting and clay tablets. The “Abasaga” tablet is described in Cuneiform Texts in the Metropolitan Museum of Art.
Creators, Conquerors, and Citizens, by Robin Waterfield, provided useful details on ancient Greek history and the rise of the poleis. The archaeologist Nicholas Cahill, who directed the dig at the former Lydian capital, spoke to me about the Lydians’ invention of coins. David Schaps’s The Invention of Coinage and the Monetization of Ancient Greece was a revelation, illuminating how coins transformed life in Greece. I spoke with Schaps to better understand a few of the points in his book, which was also the source of the Aristotle quotes.
Chapter 2
The development of coins and paper money in Sichuan was described to me in an interview by the historian Richard von Glahn. His book The Economic History of China was also a source.
The details of Cai Lun’s invention of paper come from Mark Kurlansky’s book Paper. Modern scholars have pointed out that, as with most inventions, the invention of paper was probably not a single epiphany, and Cai likely improved upon work others were doing.
The counterfeit currency warning is from von Glahn’s paper “Re-examining the Authenticity of Song Paper Money Specimens,” published in the Journal of Song-Yuan Studies.
The details of China’s economic revolution come from Mark Elvin’s book The Pattern of the Chinese Past. The restaurant quote comes from Nicholas Kiefer’s paper “Economics and the Origin of the Restaurant,” published in Cornell Hotel and Restaurant Administration Quarterly.
The story of the Mongols in China comes from Morris Rossabi’s Khubilai Khan: His Life and Times, Jack Weatherford’s Genghis Khan and the Making of the Modern World, von Glahn’s History, and from conversations with von Glahn and Rossabi.
Kenneth Pomeranz’s book The Great Divergence was influential on why Europe became so much richer than China in the modern era. In The Chinese Market Economy, 1000–1500 , William Guanglin Liu provides a detailed analysis of China’s economic boom and ultimate economic decline, and describes in detail the rulers’ shifting views of money and markets that led to both the rise and fall of the Chinese economy.
Chapter 3
The poor quality of the coins in seventeenth-century England is discussed, among other places, in Thomas Macaulay’s History of England, which is the source of the “wrangling” quote. Conversations with economic historians Stephen Quinn and George Selgin helped me understand the emergence of goldsmith fractional-reserve banking. Quinn’s paper “Goldsmith-Banking: Mutual Acceptance and Interbanker Clearing in Restoration London,” published in Explorations in Economic History, and Selgin’s “Those Dishonest Goldsmiths,” from Financial History Review, were also helpful. Swedish copper money is described in The Encyclopedia of Money, by Larry Allen, and Money and Power, by Gunnar Wetterberg.
The details about early Barcelona bankers come from Money, Bank Credit, and Economic Cycles, by Jesús Huerta de Soto. Davies was the source for much of the information about the bank run in England when King Charles decided to stop paying the debt. The quote where the treasurer of the navy worries about “notes which is now not money” comes from the British Treasury Minute Book for January 1672, which is available online, and is quoted in J. Keith Horsefield’s “The Beginnings of Paper Money in England,” published in the Journal of European Economic History.
If you want to read a biography of John Law (and who wouldn’t?), I recommend Janet Gleeson’s Millionaire: The Philanderer, Gambler, and Duelist Who Invented Modern Finance. It’s fun and readable and smart and is the source of several of the biographical details of Law’s life that run through chapters 3 through 7. John Law: Economic Theorist and Policy- Maker , by Antoin Murphy, was also a major source for these chapters and is especially strong on Law’s writing and thinking about money and economics. Law’s story is also discussed at length in Ferguson, Galbraith, and Davies.
Chapter 4
The history and math of the problem of the points is described in detail by Keith Devlin in his book The Unfinished Game.
Ian Hacking’s The Emergence of Probability helped me think about the radical transformation in thought that came with the rise of probability and is the source of the knucklebone information. Peter Bernstein’s Against the Gods had useful narrative detail about Pascal and Halley.
Halley’s paper was called “An Estimate of the Degrees of the Mortality of Mankind; drawn from curious Tables of the Births and Funerals at the City of Breslaw; with an Attempt to ascertain the Price of Annuities upon Lives.” It was published in the Philosophical Transactions of the Royal Society. James Ciecka’s “Edmond Halley’s Life Table and Its Uses,” published in the Journal of Legal Economics, was a useful guide.
The figures from Wallace and Webster’s life insurance fund are from “Early Actuarial Work in Eighteenth-Century Scotland,” by J. B. Dow, published in the Transactions of the Faculty of Actuaries. The Wallace and Webster story is well told by Ferguson.
Chapter 5
Matt Levine writes for Bloomberg. The quote about finance as time travel comes from his “Money Stuff” newsletter, which is great.
The most important source for this chapter was The World’s First Stock Exchange, by Lodewijk Petram. The book includes a lucid narrative of the VOC, the Amsterdam Stock Exchange, and the work of Isaac Le Maire. Also useful were “The Formative Years of the Modern Corporation: The Dutch East India Company VOC, 1602–1623,” from the Journal of Economic History, by Oscar Gelderblom, Abe de Jong, and Joost Jonker; and “Isaac Le Maire and the Share Trading of the Dutch East India Company,” by J. G. van Dillen, as translated by Asha Majithia and published in Pioneers of Financial Economics, Volume 1.
Joseph de la Vega, author of Confusion of Confusions, was born in Spain. His book was originally published in Spanish as Confusion de Confusiones.
Chapter 6
Details on Amsterdam’s public bank come mainly from “Early Public Banks,” a Federal Reserve Bank of Chicago working paper by William Roberds and François R. Velde, and from my interview with Velde.
Law’s “Money and Trade Considered” is discussed at length in Murphy’s biography of Law. His wanderings through Europe and rise in France are described by Gleeson and Murphy. The Memoirs of Duc de Saint-Simon, Volume 3, translated by Lucy Norton, are a great source of details about the Duke of Orléans’s debauched style, as well as Law’s rise through Parisian society.
Details about the creation of the Bank of England come from Till Time’s Last Sand: A History of the Bank of England, 1694–2013 , by David Kynaston. The magazine that reported the Regent’s deposit in John Law’s bank was the Gazette de la Régence, as quoted in Gleeson.
Chapter 7
The key sources for this chapter are Gleeson; Murphy; “John Law’s System,” published by François Velde in the American Economic Review; and my interview with Velde.
The quote from the Regent’s mother about tobacco is from Gleeson. The description of supplicants coming down Law’s chimney comes from Saint- Simon. The quote from Defoe is from John Law and the Mississippi Scheme, an anthology of Defoe’s writings on Law.
The quote from the clerk at the British embassy describing the mania comes from Murphy, as does the quote from the French government thanking Law.
The transportation of criminals to the Mississippi colony is described in Louisiana and the Gulf South Frontier, 1500–1821 , by F. Todd Smith. Information on inflation comes from “Prices and Wages at Paris Under John Law’s System,” by Earl J. Hamilton, published in the Quarterly Journal of Economics. The Saint-Simon quote comes from his Memoirs.
Gleeson and Murphy are the key sources for the details of John Law’s life after the collapse.
Chapter 8
Nordhaus’s paper on the history of light was called “Do Real-Output and Real-Wage Measures Capture Reality? The History of Lighting Suggests Not.” It was published in a collection called The Economics of New Goods. In the paper, he not only analyzed the history of light, he also concluded that economists had been underestimating the gains in lighting technology, and as a result had underestimated the extent to which people had become richer over time.
Many of the details about Nordhaus’s investigation come from a personal interview. Some of the figures presented in the chapter were calculated by Nordhaus at my request (similar figures are presented in Nordhaus’s paper, but in a more complicated way).
Details on ways people made artificial light, and on people locking themselves in their houses overnight, come from Brilliant, by Jane Brox. Information on Thomas Edison comes from Brilliant and from The Edison Papers, hosted online by Rutgers University. The New York Times article about health inspectors and Edison’s smokestacks was quoted in Brilliant and was from an article published on January 17, 1911.
Chapter 9
Many of the narrative details about the Luddites come from The Making of the English Working Class, by E. P. Thompson. Rebels Against the Future, by Kirkpatrick Sale, was also a useful source.
Marc Andreessen published “Why Software Is Eating the World” as an op- ed in the Wall Street Journal.
The story about Roper selling his invention for £5 comes from The Strutts and the Arkwrights, 1758–1830 , by R. S. Fitton and Alfred P. Wadsworth.
Quotes from Luddite letters come from Writings of the Luddites, edited by Kevin Binfield. I also interviewed Binfield to get an overview of the era.
Data on workers’ wages in this era, how they were an incentive for mechanization, and how they stagnated after mechanization, come from Robert Allen’s The British Industrial Revolution in Global Perspective and Allen’s “Engels’ Pause: Technical Change, Capital Accumulation, and Inequality in the British Industrial Revolution,” from Explorations in Economic History.
Eric Hobsbawm called the Luddite attacks “collective bargaining by riot.” The economic historian Joel Mokyr provided useful details about the Luddites in an interview.
Chapter 10
Hume’s Political Discourses was published in 1752. The chapter on trade is “Of the Balance of Trade.” The Infidel and the Professor, by Dennis C. Rasmussen, helped me understand Hume’s work and, especially, Hume’s influence on Adam Smith.
Britain’s unintentional creation of the gold standard is described in Davies. Galbraith is good on the rise of the free silver movement in the United States. Details on William Jennings Bryan come from A Godly Hero: The Life of William Jennings Bryan, by Michael Kazin. The rock critic Greil Marcus used the phrases “anxiety and success” and “terror and deliverance” in Bob Dylan by Greil Marcus.
McKinley’s speech is described in “Playing to the Press in McKinley’s Front Porch Campaign,” by William Harpine, published in Rhetoric Society Quarterly. The full speech was reported in the Indianapolis Journal under the headline “Money is the Issue.”
The key sources on Irving Fisher are My Father, Irving Fisher, by Irving Norton Fisher, and Irving Fisher: A Biography, by Robert Loring Allen. More recently, Sylvia Nassar wrote extensively about Fisher in her excellent book Grand Pursuit: The Story of Economic Genius. I also relied on Fisher’s own writings, especially The Money Illusion, Stabilizing the Dollar, and Stable Money.
Domestic box office figures come from Box Office Mojo. Inflation calculations were made with the Bureau of Labor Statistics’ CPI Inflation Calculator.
Chapter 11
Thomas Govan’s Nicholas Biddle is the standard biography of Biddle and the source for details on his early life. In describing Biddle’s work running the Bank of the United States, I relied largely on Jane Knodell’s The Second Bank of the United States and on an interview I did with Knodell. Richard Sylla, of NYU, called Biddle the “world’s first self-conscious central banker” in an interview with the Minneapolis Fed.
Details about Andrew Jackson’s life come from Arthur Schlesinger Jr.’s The Age of Jackson, Jon Meacham’s American Lion, and Andrew Jackson, by H.
W. Brands. Taney’s complaints about Biddle are from Taney’s “Bank War Manuscript.”
Bray Hammond’s Banks and Politics in America: From the Revolution to the Civil War was a key source for the free banking era. The quote about coins that “flew about the country with the celerity of magic” is from a Michigan bank commissioners’ report from 1839 and is quoted in Galbraith.
The number of banknotes in circulation comes from “Our Abominable Currency System,” published in the Chicago Tribune on February 13, 1863. In an interview, Matthew Jaremski mentioned the Santa Claus note as a particularly delightful example of a banknote of the era. I found an example of a Santa Claus note in Thompson’s 1859 Bank Note Descriptive List, Supplementary to Thompson’s Bank Note & Commercial Reporter.
The case in which a court said the right to deal in money should be as free as the right to deal in wheat or cotton was Warner v. Beers, in 1840. The quote about the traveler having to constantly change money is from Letters of Lowndes. One of the important early papers in rethinking the free banking era was “The Free Banking Era: A Reexamination,” by Hugh Rockoff, published in the Journal of Money, Credit and Banking. “Do Economists Reach a Conclusion on Free Banking Episodes?” by Rockoff and Ignacio Briones, published in Econ Journal Watch, is a good overview of the literature. The quote from Bagehot is from his book Lombard Street,
still an essential source on the function of central banks during crises.
Roger Lowenstein’s America’s Bank: The Epic Struggle to Create the Federal Reserve is a comprehensive account of the creation of the Fed and the source for many of the details about the origins of the Fed.
The quote about people blaming the wily practices of Wall Street is from Paul Warburg’s The Federal Reserve System: Its Origin and Growth. Gary Gorton wrote that if Wall Street greed caused financial crises, we’d have a crisis every week.
The quote about meeting in secret on the train car came from Frank A. Vanderlip, president of the National City Bank, who described the experience in the Saturday Evening Post.
The details of how the Fed emerged after the bankers came back from Jekyll Island come from Lowenstein.
Chapter 12
Lords of Finance, by Liaquat Ahamed, is brilliant and insightful and more delightful than a book about central bankers and the Great Depression has any right to be. It is an essential source for this chapter.
The other essential source is A Monetary History of the United States, 1867–1960 , by Milton Friedman and Anna Schwartz, who described in great detail everything the Federal Reserve banks did during this period, and who changed the way economists understand the Great Depression.
“The self-fulfilling prophecy” was coined in an article of the same name, published in The Antioch Review by Robert K. Merton. The 2012 survey of economists’ views on the gold standard was conducted by the IGM Forum at the University of Chicago Booth School of Business. Hoover’s “forced off the gold standard… means chaos” quote comes from a campaign speech in Des Moines, Iowa, on October 4, 1932.
Arthur Schlesinger Jr.’s “pseudo-respectability” quote is from his book The Coming of the New Deal, 1933–1935. Warren’s trip on a little plane to see Roosevelt is described in The Money Makers, by Eric Rauchway. Details on the bartering that emerged as money disappeared come from Ahamed.
The Woodin quote is from One Nation Under Gold, by James Ledbetter. The Roosevelt quote is from the official transcript of his press conference on March 8, 1933.
A firsthand account of the “end of Western Civilization” scene, when Roosevelt told his advisors he was taking the United States off the gold standard, comes from Raymond Moley’s After Seven Years. The scene is also described in Rauchway. Irving Fisher’s letter to his wife is quoted in My Father, Irving Fisher.
Data on recoveries in prices, employment, and incomes in 1933 come from the St. Louis Fed. A key work on how the gold standard caused a global depression, and how leaving the gold standard was essential to turning the economy around, is Golden Fetters, by Barry Eichengreen. “The Gold
Standard and the Great Depression,” by Eichengreen and Peter Temin, published in Contemporary European History, is a useful analysis of how “the mentality of the gold standard” transformed an ordinary economic contraction into the Great Depression.
Roosevelt’s letter to a Harvard professor is quoted in Schlesinger.
Chapter 13
The idea that a shadow bank run was at the heart of the financial crisis of 2008 was largely developed by Gary Gorton, a Yale economist (who also worked for AIG, which was bailed out during the crisis by the federal government). Gorton’s book Misunderstanding Financial Crises is a good overview.
The story of Bruce Bent’s early life, and his development of the money- market mutual fund, comes largely from an interview I conducted with Bent and his son, Bruce Bent II.
Some details of the early growth of the Reserve Fund come from the Wall Street Journal obituary of Henry Brown, “Co-Inventor of Money-Market Account Helped Serve Small Investors’ Interest,” by Stephen Miller.
Figures on the growth of money-market funds and their role in buying commercial paper come from “The Road to Repeal of the Glass-Steagall Act,” by Arthur Wilmarth, published in the Wake Forest Journal of Business and Intellectual Property Law, and “The Evolution of the U.S. Commercial Paper Market Since 1980,” by Mitchell A. Post, published in the Federal Reserve Bulletin. Citi’s invention of asset-backed commercial paper is described in The Growth of Shadow Banking, by Matthias Thiemann.
Bent’s 2001 “garbage” quote about commercial paper was cited by the 2008 Wall Street Journal article “A Money-Fund Manager’s Fateful Shift,” by Steve Stecklow and Diya Gullapalli, which traced Bent’s move into commercial paper. The “prudent rather than plain” quote from Bent II is from the Nov. 6, 2000, Wall Street Journal article “Money-Market Funds Suit Many Investors, But Proud Creator Frets About Extra Risk,” by Bridget O’Brian.
The writings of Zoltan Pozsar are an excellent source on the rise of institutional pools of money. See, for example, his Federal Reserve Bank of New York Staff Report “Shadow Banking,” coauthored with Tobias Adrian,
Adam Ashcraft, and Hayley Boesky. Pozsar also talked me through his ideas in an interview.
McCulley coined the term “shadow banking” at the Federal Reserve’s Jackson Hole conference in 2007. He later described that moment in an April 2010 speech titled “After the Crisis: Planning a New Financial Structure Learning from the Bank of Dad,” the transcript of which is posted on PIMCO’s website.
The Ricks quote is from his book The Money Problem: Rethinking Financial Regulation. Ricks also spoke with me in an interview.
The details on the fall of Bear Stearns come from the Financial Crisis Inquiry Report, published by the Financial Crisis Inquiry Commission. Bear Stearns and Lehman Brothers were both largely borrowing in the repo market.
The “sound night’s sleep” quote from Bent is from the Wall Street Journal article “Father of Money Funds Raps His Creation,” by Daisy Maxey. The annual report was published on May 31, 2008.
Details of what happened at the Primary Fund the week of Sept. 15, 2008, come from a lawsuit the Securities and Exchange Commission filed in 2009 against Bruce Bent, Bruce Bent II, the Reserve Primary Fund, and its parent company. The jury cleared the Bents of fraud charges. They found that Bent II was liable for one claim of negligence, and the parent company was found to have made fraudulent statements. Direct quotes of conversations come from transcripts of phone calls that were introduced into the court record as part of the case. The lawyer who worked at the New York Fed during the crisis spoke with me in an interview.
The quotes from President Bush are from the official transcript of his Sept. 19, 2008, speech, “Remarks on the National Economy.”
The Group of Thirty report was “Financial Reform: A Framework for Financial Stability.” The industry report that argued against fundamental change was the “Report of the Money Market Working Group” of the Investment Company Institute.
The Sheila Bair quote is from the Wall Street Journal article “Why the Fed
Had to Backstop Money-Market Funds, Again,” by Paul Kiernan, Andrew Ackerman, and Dave Michaels.
Chapter 14
The Euro, by David Marsh, is an excellent book-length treatment of the origins of the euro. It is a key source for this chapter, including for most of the early exchanges between European leaders. The German magazine Der Spiegel’s article “Was the Deutsche Mark Sacrificed for Reunification?” was also an important source. Pohl and his colleagues argued for “comprehensive political union” in the “Monthly Report of the Deutsche Bundesbank, October 1990.” The Frankfurt fireworks at the introduction of the euro were described in the Los Angeles Times article “It’s Happy New Euro for a Continent,” by Carol J. Williams.
Fast economic growth in peripheral euro-area countries was noted in the European Commission’s Annual Report on the Euro Area 2007. George Papandreou is the Greek prime minister who disclosed that the deficit was 12 percent. Jean-Claude Juncker is the one who said “the game is over” after Greek statistics were found out.
The details about government spending and tax evasion in Greece come from Greece’s ‘Odious’ Debt, by Jason Manolopoulos. The “stupid to finance profligacy” quote from Martin Wolf appears in his book The Shifts and the Shocks. “A look back: what Eurozone ‘risk sharing’ actually meant,” by Marcello Minenna, published online by the Financial Times, shows German bank lending to Greece, Spain, and other eurozone countries. The German trade surplus with the rest of the eurozone is described in “The German trade surplus may widen with the euro area recovery,” published by the think tank Bruegel. Data on unemployment rates and economic growth come from the St. Louis Fed. Federal versus state tax data come from the Tax Policy Center Briefing Book. Retirement age in Greece and Germany was discussed in the Economist article “What Makes Germans So Very Cross About Greece?” The “political union” quote from Kohl is from The Birth of the Euro, by Otmar Issing.
The “Titanic” quote from the Spanish foreign minister was reported in the
Guardian article “Spain Issues Dramatic Messages of Impending Eurozone
Doom,” by Giles Tremlett. The biographical details about Mario Draghi, and details surrounding his “whatever it takes” speech, come from the Bloomberg News story “3 Words and $3 Trillion: The Inside Story of How Mario Draghi Saved the Euro,” by Jana Randow and Alessandro Speciale.
Chapter 15
Digital Gold, by Nathaniel Popper, and The Age of Cryptocurrency, by Paul Vigna and Michael J. Casey, are useful overviews of the story of bitcoin and cryptocurrency. This Machine Kills Secrets, by Andy Greenberg, is a good telling of the cypherpunk story.
David Chaum published “Security Without Identification: Transaction Systems to Make Big Brother Obsolete” in Communications of the ACM. Chaum described his early life to me in a phone interview. The patent I quote from is for a “Cryptographic identification, financial transaction, and credential device.”
The Wired quote is from “E-Money (That’s What I Want),” by Steven Levy. The New York Times Magazine quote is from “Dead as a Dollar,” by James Gleick. Citibank’s e-money program, and the international spread of DigiCash, are described in The Age of Cryptocurrency. The Greenspan quote is from a 1997 speech, “Privacy in the Information Age.”
Timothy May described his discovery of Chaum’s work, and his role in creating the cypherpunks, in an interview with me. Some cypherpunk details come from This Machine Kills Secrets, and from The Dark Net, by Jamie Bartlett.
Back’s 1997 email is archived at hashcash.org. “Pricing via Processing, or Combatting Junk Mail” was published in the proceedings of the Crypto ’92 conference. Wei Dai’s b-money proposal is archived at weidai.com. The email from Satoshi Nakamoto to Wei Dai is at nakamotostudies.org. The original bitcoin paper is known as the “Bitcoin Whitepaper” and is available at bitcoin.org, among many other places. The 2009 Nakamoto messages are at nakamotoinstitute.org. The Laszlo pizza post was (and is) at bitcointalk.org. The buyer of the pizza was profiled by Mark Molloy in a Telegraph article headlined “The inside story behind the famous 2010 bitcoin pizza purchase today worth $83m.”
The quotes from the Dread Pirate Roberts are from “Collected Quotations
of the Dread Pirate Roberts, Founder of Underground Drug Site Silk Road and Radical Libertarian,” published in Forbes. The drug listings from the Silk Road are from a Sept. 27, 2013, complaint filed in United States v. Ross William Ulbricht, aka Dread Pirate Roberts. The quote from Ulbricht’s sentencing is from the Wired story “Silk Road Creator Ross Ulbricht Sentenced to Life in Prison,” by Andy Greenberg.
The Senate hearing was called “Beyond Silk Road: Potential Risks, Threats, and Promises of Virtual Currencies.” Testimony is posted on the committee’s website. The Washington Post story “This Senate hearing is a bitcoin lovefest” was by Timothy B. Lee. The Wall Street Journal story quoting the venture capitalist was “Bitcoin Startups Begin to Attract Real Cash,” by Sarah E. Needleman and Spencer E. Ante. Visa’s transaction capacity comes from Visa’s website. Figures on Chinese miners come from the Reuters story “China’s Bitcoin Miners Scoop Up Greater Production Power.” The Gavin Andresen quote is from my interview with Andresen. Bitcoin exchange rates are from coindesk.com.
Conclusion
The Kenyan mobile-money-by-text system was M-Pesa. The figure for Alipay was cited by the Reuters story “China’s Ant aims for $200 bln price tag in private share sales,” by Julie Zhu, Kane Wu, and Zhang Yan. Figures for the amount of cash in circulation, and the denominations, come from the Federal Reserve. Ken Rogoff argued for getting rid of big bills in his book The Curse of Cash.
The Swedish cash heist was described in detail in the Atavist Magazine article “Lifted,” by Evan Ratliff. Figures for declining cash use in Sweden come from the Riksbank report “Payments in Sweden 2019.” The quote from the Swedish National Pensioners’ Association is from “Sweden’s Push to Get Rid of Cash Has Some Saying, ‘Not So Fast,’” a New York Times article by Liz Alderman.
The “chief loose screw” quote comes from “A Program for Monetary Reform,” a report written by Irving Fisher and several other economists in
1939. Milton Friedman discussed full-reserve banking in A Program for Monetary Stability. The John Cochrane quote is from an interview with me. The “worst is the one we have today” quote is from Mervyn King’s 2010 speech “Banking—from Bagehot to Basel, and Back Again.”
Representative Ocasio-Cortez supported MMT in the Business Insider article “Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez says the theory that deficit spending is good for the economy should ‘absolutely’ be part of the conversation,” by Eliza Relman. Stephanie Kelton and Warren Mosler told me their stories in phone interviews. Mosler’s ideas are also described in Seven Deadly Innocent Frauds of Economic Policy.