The Money Plot: A History from Shells to Bullion to Bitcoin - Softcover

Kaufman, Frederick

 
9781635423150: The Money Plot: A History from Shells to Bullion to Bitcoin
Softcover
ISBN 10: 1635423155 ISBN 13: 9781635423150
Verlag: Other Press, 2022

Inhaltsangabe

Half fable, half manifesto, this brilliant new take on the ancient concept of cash lays bare its unparalleled capacity to empower and enthrall us.
 
Frederick Kaufman tackles the complex history of money, beginning with the earliest myths and wrapping up with Wall Street’s byzantine present-day doings. Along the way, he exposes a set of allegorical plots, stock characters, and stereotypical metaphors that have long been linked with money and commercial culture, from Melanesian trading rituals to the dogma of Medieval churchmen faced with global commerce, the rationales of Mercantilism and colonial expansion, and the U.S. dollar’s 1971 unpinning from gold.
 
The Money Plot offers a tool to see through the haze of modern banking and finance, demonstrating that the standard reasons given for economic inequality—the Neoliberal gospel of market forces—are, like dollars, euros, and yuan, contingent upon structures people have designed. It shines a light on the one percent’s efforts to contain a money culture that benefits them within boundaries they themselves are increasingly setting. And Kaufman warns that if we cannot recognize what is going on, we run the risk of becoming pawns and shells ourselves, of becoming characters in someone else’s plot, of becoming other people’s money.

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Über die Autorin bzw. den Autor

Frederick Kaufman, an English professor by training and profession, has for the past decade focused his attention on the fiction that is money. His unorthodox insights into the ways of Wall Street have resulted in numerous magazine articles for publications ranging from Scientific American to Wired to Foreign Policy to Harper’s, as well as television appearances on NBC, Bloomberg, Fox Business Network, and Democracy Now!, and invitations to lecture in both the United States and Europe, including an address to the General Assembly of the United Nations.

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BEHIND THE CURTAIN

This book traces the history of two activities we generally consider to be different — exchanging money and telling stories — to show how they are the same. Chapters follow parallels in the growth and development of each. Thus we have the money plot, at the core of which resides the most compelling symbol ever created.
This book does not ask whether we should love or hate or even need money. The question is: What drives our belief in this thing called money? The answer has to do with the nature of symbols, and why humans thirst for them.
When economist John Maynard Keynes declared in his 1924 Tract on Monetary Reform that money based upon gold was a “barba­rous relic,” he was arguing that gold was simply one possible manifestation of a substance that required no specific shape. Gold was a symbol, and as such could be replaced by a variety of other symbols. The form that money assumed was accidental. Money not made of gold was still money.
The symbolic nature of money — that is, the fact that money can inhabit any number of material configurations and remain money — was itself not part of the Keynesian theory. But without Keynes’ embrace of money as a symbol there could have been no theory, much less Keynesian practices such as deficit spending, whereby a sovereign state may pay for anything it wants or needs with money it prints, money that symbolizes no more and no less than its own sovereign power. A dollar, for example, embodies noth­ing but the “full faith and credit” of the United States. Thus is a dol­lar symbolic.
When it comes to money, symbols are useful. That is why Keynes was not alone among economists. If they had ever met, Adam Smith and Karl Marx would have soon discovered that when it came to theories of prices, costs, wages, and profits, they disagreed. But, along with Keynes, both would have readily consented to the fact that even as money possessed an extraordinarily practical capacity to influence a wide variety of very real, non-metaphorical things, money itself was metaphorical. Money’s influence and the effects of its dominion may have been disputed, but there was no debating the fact that a dollar or a pound or a mark were placeholders, sym­bolic building blocks for what the great economists believed to be much larger concerns. Those larger concerns became the business of illustrious economic schools of thought that arose in the wake of Smith’s ideas about free markets and Marx’s ideas about class strug­gle and proletarian revolution. Of course, it is perfectly understandable that the economists who came up with the most enduring and influential theories were not always as interested in studying the symbolic core of their sys­tems as they were in its pervasive effects. Perhaps because so many economic subjects have been so bitterly disputed, the artifice that lies at the bottom of them all has been lost in the shuffle. The following pages turn the tables. Instead of surveying the far-­reaching implications of this or that school of economic thought, this book will prioritize the symbolic bedrock.
Which is most definitely not to say that this book emerged with­out the influence of economic thought. The approach deployed throughout is in many ways indebted to the cultural insights of the Hungarian economic historian Karl Polanyi, who in 1944 — the year the Bretton Woods Agreement made the United States dollar the world’s preeminent currency — published a book called The Great Transformation, followed thirteen years later by Trade and Market in the Early Empires, written with a group of colleagues and follow­ers. In these books, Polanyi drew on cross­cultural anthropology to investigate the history of economies that had thrived before there were markets as we have come to know them, finding that some­thing very much like money had existed long before coin and bill.
What we call money, what we consider finance, and whatever the­ory we propose about the economic system as a whole — all of these reflect our moment in time. Which is another way of saying that money conforms to the fictions of the age, whether those fictions go by the name myth, religion, historical narrative, literary masterpiece, or digital meme. For an economic philosophy, just like a social, polit­ical, or religious philosophy, can hold sway only as long as we believe the story it tells. A dollar without full faith and credit is a failed dollar. Another way of putting it is that the history of money, while closely related to the history of economics, is not the same thing. The history of money is a history of symbols, while the history of economics is a history of what we can do and have done with those symbols.
A symbol lies behind economics. But what lies behind the sym­bol? Since the moment someone declared that a bead was part of a story about something more than a bead, and the bead subsequently transformed in the listener’s imagination from dross material to an amulet imbued with spirit and value, it has been the person who created, explained, and promulgated the symbol — that is, the story­teller — who has directed the show. The man who defines the mean­ing of the symbol is the man behind the curtain. Today, that curtain may be a digital firewall behind which lie the untold opulence of Amazon and Facebook, it may be the unbreakable code of a cryp­tocurrency, or the hopelessly baroque protocols of an index fund behind which reside retirement funds worth trillions. It may be the closed-­door ruminations of the Federal Open Market Committee of the Federal Reserve as central bankers decide interest rates on bil­lions of United States Treasury bills, or how to inject trillions into an economic system in need of support. The goal of this book is to pull back the curtain, crack open the doors, decrypt the encryptions, and lay bare the bones of the stories and storytellers that lie at the foundation of the symbol system known as money.
Over the past several millennia a great deal of human desire has been embedded within money — be the currency an armband fash­ioned from polished shells, an overflowing silo of wheat, a herd of goats, a bevy of concubines, an electronic hoard of Bitcoin, or the United States dollar. And just as striking as the extraordinary muta­bility of money has been the fact that certain basic human desires abide no matter what social, political, religious, or economic system may prevail. And human desire, which the American poet Wallace Stevens once called “the motive for metaphor,” knows no economic school.

{1} THE  SHELL  GAME    
 
Words are what they aren't. The word “tree,” for example, has virtually nothing in common with that massive amalgamation of roots, branches, and leaves. Words don’t reflect reality so much as they reduce it to a more manageable, human scale. They give us a measure of control, and on this fundamental level the motive for turning the world into words coincides with the motive for turning the world into money.
About 65,000 years ago, Homo sapiens created the bead. The ear­liest were excavated in the 1980s along the coastal hinterlands of Kenya. Each measured half the circumference of a penny, and the parallel lines, dots, and hash marks that adorned them led archeol­ogists to suspect they must have communicated an important mes­sage. They conjecture that the cave dwellers who made and marked them believed the beads possessed secret powers, so that those who wore them next to their bodies might not only gain status among their peers, but might decrease their exposure to risk and increase their...

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Verlag
Other Press
Erscheinungsdatum
2022
Sprache
Englisch
ISBN 10 
1635423155
ISBN 13 
9781635423150
Einband
Taschenbuch
Anzahl der Seiten
304
Kontakt zum Hersteller
Nicht verfügbar
Verantwortliche Person
Nicht verfügbar

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