Merton Miller writes in his foreword to Money and the Nation State that this book “provides the essential framework for those willing to return to first principles in thinking about the role of monetary arrangements in economic life.”

This volume, edited by noted financial economists Kevin Dowd and Richard Timberlake, gathers the work of seventeen top scholars on all-important aspects of monetary theory and history. As the editors note in their introduction, a growing list of observers now acknowledges that the world’s financial problems are systemic.

Thomas Cargill opens Section II of the book with an examination of U.S. financial policy since the fall of the Bretton Woods regime, which gave way to an era of incomplete and inequitable deregulation which, along with bad tax policy, helped produce the savings and loan crisis. This shameful response to the insolvency of the industry—including an increase in federal deposit insurance—only made matters far worse.

Alan Reynolds examines this “moral hazard” problem in the International Monetary Fund, reporting that he can find no example of IMF intervention “unambiguously improving an economy’s performance over a sustained period.” Instead, he notes, the IMF typically requires borrowing nations to engage in “destructive devaluation and suffocating taxation,” destroying economic growth.

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