An interesting dive into the crazy world of money. I still feel kerfuddled by it but at least this text is accessible and I would recommend to anyone interested in economics or just wanting to understand it more.

This book struck a strange balance, in that it's a very simple introduction but also assumes a certain level of financial knowledge (which I, a money idiot, do not have). I really enjoyed the early chapters on the history of money and how it came to exist as a concept, but when it moved onto more modern financial matters like... stocks? (as you can see I did not retain as much information from this book as I'd hoped), it was harder to stay focused. I'm glad I read this, but I still don't really understand money or the basics of the financial system.

An interesting tale of money through the ages.
More useful for those with little knowledge of the way that money works & who wants to be told via little stories and annecdotes.

Despite the kind of rollicking ever-so-slightly condescending and too-jokey style, I learned from this book about the history of this exchange material : money. The part it plays in politics and in art world, is spelled out over time and place in fascinating ways. Coins vs. Paper etc are discussed too. I am not sure what I was expecting but this gave me different information than I thought it would so I kept checking the jacket cover! Useful in its way - playing down to reader in its sarky tone .. but that is dependent on personal taste.

Money. What is it? We all have it, some more than others, but do we really understand what we have? Do we believe we have something but, when analysed, find we have nothing? How real is that thing we know as MONEY?

Goldstein takes us on a journey through the history of money. His easily accessible journalistic style helps us understand what might, in other's hands, be rather complex concepts as we learn about barter, value, gold standards, shadow banking, cryptocurrency and more. His insight into past and current banking "crises" helped me as a reader to understand a little more about why rather than what and I found the writing style to be captivating on subjects that have heretofore been rather dry.

I'd thoroughly recommend this book if you've anything more than a passing interest in the cash in your pocket and the bank at the end of your loan. It might just change how you think and, at the very least, might provide an insight into financial policy. If ever there was a time when we needed to understand the implications of spending and borrowing, now is that time.

With thanks to the author, publisher and NetGalley for the ARC in return for an honest review.

I didn't think a book a out money could be as entertaining as this.

Money was an enjoyable and easy read which provided a huge amount of information about the way societies have come to think of money.

I had no idea of the history behind money and how different current views are to those of the past.

Highly recommended!

This was a really interesting book on the history of money from its origins to bitcoin. It’s told in a very accessible and engaging way, and the only thing that stops it being a five star book for me is that at times I thought it strayed slightly into childrens’ book territory - this author loves an exclamation point! One to keep and refer to.

This is an engaging and easy to understand history of money, which has done possibly the best job I've found so far of explaining things like bitcoin, blockchain and what happened with the 2008 crash.
The stuff further back in history is also fascinating, although I find the idea that the next big collapse of money is inevitable at some point slightly terrifying. If you're a person who thinks of themselves as business or money minded, this would be a great primer/introduction for you.

I loved this fascinating book. It's a very accessible read, even though some of the concepts need a bit of thought. It's definitely aimed at the American market, but it is still an excellent book for anyone interested in money, and one I will be recommending.

Money only works because we all agree to believe in it; that's the reality of one of humanity's strangest inventions. In Money, economics columnist, Jacob Goldstein shows how money is a useful fiction that has shaped societies for thousands of years, from the rise of coins in ancient Greece to the first stock market in Amsterdam to the emergence of shadow banking in the 21st century. At the heart of the story are the fringe thinkers and world leaders who reimagined money. Kublai Khan, the Mongol emperor, created paper money backed by nothing, centuries before it appeared in the west. John Law, a professional gambler and convicted murderer, brought modern money to France (and destroyed the country's economy). The cypherpunks, a group of radical libertarian computer programmers, paved the way for bitcoin.

One thing they all realised: what counts as money (and what doesn't) is the result of choices we make, and those choices have a profound effect on who gets more stuff and who gets less, who gets to take risks when times are good, and who gets screwed when things go bad. All in all, this is lively, accessible, and full of interesting details (like the 43-pound copper coins that 17th-century Swedes carried strapped to their backs), Money is the story of the choices that gave us money as we know it today. Goldstein reminds us that money is a concept rather than the paper and coins we refer to as such and through a combination of fascinating, informative and entertaining anecdotes he ensures that after picking up this book you'll never think of money in quite the same way again. Many thanks to Atlantic Books for an ARC.

I live with somebody who understands a lot about money. I don't mean that she's great with the household budget (although we seem to keep afloat somehow) but that she understands some of the arcane areas of financial policy that make me very pleased that it's her job and not mine. She's always reading books on the financial system, or the pensions industry, and she knows how credit cards work. (You may think you know how credit cards work, but I promise you, you don't.)

Anyway, I thought it might be nice if I could read something intelligent about money and kid her that I am entitled to view on whether or not Britain is running an unacceptable deficit, just as much as she is. So when Atlantic Books offered me a copy of Jacob Goldstein’s Money via NetGalley, I leapt at the chance to improve my financial literacy.

Goldstein hosts a podcast, Planet Money, and writes about money for New York Times Magazine. He understands his subject and is an excellent communicator. He talks through the history of money from the idea of proto-money – things that had value because of, for example, their use in religious ceremonies – through the use of precious metals as stores of value and into paper money. Paper money is probably what most people today would identify as “real money” but Goldstein goes on to point out that most value now is stored not as paper currency but as digital information on the ledgers of financial institutions.

As the money that we used to settle our debts, pay our mortgages, and trade with, became increasingly detached from any material store of wealth we moved more towards modern financial systems with all the strengths and weaknesses that they have. The strengths include the ability to create money by lending out more than you actually have. While you can't lend people more gold than you have in your vaults, it's easy to write promissory notes for more gold than there is in your vaults provided that not everybody cashes them in at once (as in a run on the bank). The extra money that is created in this way and the liquidity that it provides within the economy allows for substantial economic growth. Goldstein argues that times when money is being created correlate well with periods of economic growth while times when money is taken out of the system (for example by increasing interest rates or increasing taxation) correlate with periods of depression. He argues that the principal cause of the Great Depression was the Fed's policy of raising interest rates in an attempt to maintain a link between the paper money that they issued and their gold reserves.

Whilst the creation of money not backed by any tangible assets allows dramatic economic growth and a genuine increase in wealth, it also allows substantial opportunities for fraud or crashes caused by that foolishness that we call "bubbles". A good example of both would be bitcoin. It's worth noting here that, whilst I still can't claim to properly understand it, the description of the theory behind bitcoin given in this book is the clearest I have ever seen.

After talking us through the theory of the gold standard and the arcane mysteries of shadow banking, as well as more technical terminology (all terribly clearly explained) that I'm not going to fit into a review, Goldstein gets political. The theory behind the euro is examined and found wanting while the ideas underpinning modern monetary theory (MMT) get a much more positive assessment.

The penultimate paragraph of the book mentions covid (full marks for topicality). As we re-examine so many of the fundamentals of the modern world, perhaps MMT and the possibility of governments simply printing all the money that they need and never worrying about paying it back, is not as mad as it may once have seemed.

This is a fascinating book full of random digressions that do not make you lose sight of the main argument. I particularly enjoyed the discussion of increasing wealth in terms of the amount of light that you can buy for a day’s work. It includes what is undoubtedly the most impressive illustrative graph I have seen anywhere and the book is probably worth buying for that alone. Even without that graph, though, it is an astonishingly entertaining and informative gallop through the theory of money and how it can be applied in the real world. If you don't already know all this stuff and want to be able to understand something of what is going on around you (let alone share your opinions on social media) I strongly recommend that you get hold of a copy.