Our parents thought debt was new and shameful. Our great-grandfathers would rather have been seen in a bawdy house than in a bank. Times change, but not so very much. Philip Coggan's text is a traditional one: in the midst of life, we are in debt. Owing money isn't a sign of extravagance and turpitude but a basic fact of modern living and one we need to understand before it changes for ever. Coggan briskly punctures what a predecessor called the "myth of lost economic virtue", the idea that in a golden past books were always balanced and nobody – individuals, families or nations – spent a penny more than they legitimately earned. He shows how money has turned from something mined and solid to metaphysical magic and numbers on a screen. He flips some current shibboleths: we have lost confidence in bankers, but… bankers have also lost confidence in us. If cash is a paper promise, most loans are contracted with fingers firmly crossed. Our present mess has a long and complex history. Crucifying a few bankers won't solve it.
This is the perfect book for anyone young enough to think that Bretton Woods is a conservation project by tree-huggers or that the gold standard has to do with Olympic qualifying times. Coggan's wise and clever account starts in antiquity and works up to the present. It tells the Oz-like story of how the mighty dollar became (literally) as good as gold, deposing Keynes's "barbarous relic". Its central understanding is that all economic thought is relative not just in terms of competition between nation states and ideological blocs, but within them, too. Accepting JK Galbraith's point that it is a prerogative of the rich to find social virtue in whatever suits their immediate needs, Coggan acknowledges that a consumer doesn't see the world in the same way as a financier, and that how one interprets the economic realities of the moment depends absolutely on where one stands in the economic nexus. Man crucified on a cross of gold, the pound in your pocket, the eurodollar market, the unlamented ERM, Ireland, Iceland, Greece… it's all here.
