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Strategies & Market Trends : Booms, Busts, and Recoveries -- Ignore unavailable to you. Want to Upgrade?

To: Oblomov who wrote (21862)	7/30/2002 8:49:09 AM
From: Ilaine	Respond to of 74559

The book is very much worth reading even though one disagrees with Polanyi's philosophy, because he gets his facts right, and he puts them together with insight. By now I've read maybe a dozen explanations for the breakdown of the gold exchange standard. I recommend his for two reasons -- one does not need to understand economics to understand what he is saying, and he really conveys the historical significance. As Mundell said, if only Hoover had devalued gold, what a lot of grief the world would have been spared. No Great Depression, probably no Hitler, thus no World War II. The thing most people don't get, so far removed from the time, was how artificial the gold standard was, and how much effort it took to maintain it. Not at all the same thing as simply using gold (and other precious metals) as a medium of exchange as man had done for thousands of years. Had no idea "The Great Transformation" was trendy. I just think it's really interesting.