Money Mischief: Episodes in Monetary History - Hardcover

Milton Friedman is a senior research fellow at the Hoover Institution, Stanford University, and the Paul Snowden Distinguished Service Professor Emeritus of Economics at the University of Chicago. In 1976 he was awarded the Nobel Prize in economics. He has written a number of books, including two with his wife, Rose D. Friedman—the bestselling Free to Choose and Two Lucky People: Memoirs, the latter published by the University of Chicago Press. 

Nobel Prize-winner Friedman demonstrates through historical events the mischief that can result from misunderstanding the monetary system, and explains what the present monetary system in the US means for individual Americans as well as for the global economy. Annotation c. Book News, Inc., Portland, OR (booknews.com) (Booknews )

From the Micronesian Yap islands' 12-foot stone "coins" to today's paper currencies backed only by fiat, Nobel-laureate economist Friedman ( Free to Choose ) here examines anomalies of world monetary history, including the effect of successive 19th-century gold ore discoveries and refining improvements on U.S. and British tender. He traces American currency's long, contentious gold-silver bimetalist saga, marked by the so-called Congressional coinage "crime of 1873" and ending with William Jennings Bryan's unsuccessful "Cross of Gold" presidential campaign in 1896. Friedman cites harsh lessons from postwar hyperinflation in many countries and declares that Roosevelt's 1933 silver-buying program may have skewed China's silver-based economy toward eventual communism. Uncontrolled money growth is the cause of inflation, the author stresses, and only monetary reform, despite undesirable side effects like unemployment, can cure it. Abstruse, theoretical and chiefly for the initiate, the book recycles parts of earlier works by Friedman, who himself suggests here that the general reader might wish to skip a particularly challenging chapter.
  (Publishers Weekly )

In this latest work, Nobel Prize-winning economist Friedman examines the role of money backed by gold and silver and our current world of fiat backed by faith. After an initial restatement of the essence of his monetary views, Friedman examines the historical impact of bimetallism in the United States and elsewhere. He devotes the remainder of the book to the principles and problems of modern money unlinked to any commodity. Often iconoclastic yet always persuasive, whatever Friedman has to say about money should always be read. Highly recommended for college and university libraries.
- Richard C. Schiming, Mankato State Univ., Minn.
(Library Journal )