Customer Reviews

Free Money: Plan for Prosperity

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Since 1971 the US is off the gold standard. This means that a growing economy cannot be thrown into depression just because there is not enough gold to back the growing stock of money required to sustain it. It is enough now to create the money out of nothing. And this is done, the quantity of money created is known as the "federal debt", and it is completely unlike a household or corporate debt, which is a real financial burden. Debt cannot be a burden to an entity that creates money.

Unfortunately, 99% of economists, Nobel laureates including, of all persuasions: neoliberal, Keynesian, Austrian, have not caught up to the simple fact that the monetary system is nothing like the gold standard that ruled when the textbooks they learned about money from were written. The erroneous set of beliefs and dogmas (eg. "federal debt is like a household debt") is perpetuated. A small group of economists, known as chartalists or MMT-ers (after Modern Monetary Theory) have figured out the fiat (non gold-related) money. The author of the book is not among them, he discovered this by himself, a true genius. His book is definitely recommended, if you want to understand why some countries go bankrupt and others can run 200% debt-to-GDP ratio and manage to sell massive amounts of bonds despite offering near zero interest.

If you read this book you will see how confused the most famous economists are, how their thinking is muddled by false analogies and unspoken, yet absurd, assumptions.

Obviously, I think it is worth it.

Every once in a while, you find a book that changes your view of the world. FREE MONEY showed me why the common knowledge about the economy is completely wrong. It showed me how to predict the stock market, which I've done successfully for the past 5 years, using the simple method described.
It showed me why we had the recession and the recovery. It showed me why Chairman Greenspan's mistakes were largely responsible for the recession, and how close we were to a depression.
It showed me solutions to the Social Security and Medicare problems.
In short, this is one of the most important books I ever have read, and it made a lot of money for me, too.

Fresh perspective on what money is all about. And maybe the real answer to the financial mess the world is in now. A must read.

FREE MONEY is one of the best non-fiction books I have read. It's logical and easy reading, and it challenges every notion I've had about our economy. I now understand what has happened in the stock market, and more importantly, what will happen. A terrific book!

An excellent book. Shows how to lower taxes and at the same time, support Social Security (as well as Medicare, the military, crime prevention.) Has dozens of ideas you never see in the media. No gobble-de-gook. Very easy reading. It's counter-intuitive but logical. If you want a fresh view of what has happened in our economy and what will happen, this is the book for you.

All of the detractors of this book obviously haven't read it...or his website...or his blog. The essence of this book, which is MMT, is considered mainstream economics (post Keynesian as a matter of fact). So for all of you that say "this is contradicted by the textbooks..." or "this isn't mainstream...," put a sock in it. This is the exact same stuff that's taught by L. Randall Wray, Bill Mitchell, and James Galbraith (and to some degree, Hyman Minsky), which are all well known, reputable economists. And for all of the "Zimbabwe" nonsense, everybody knows that that country and the United States have different economic conditions. You can't compare a corrupt third world country with a low economics education, and completely different economic conditions, to the United States. Pure ridiculousness.

This book should be required reading in public schools (and the earlier, the better).

I understand why the product description says that the book is praised by economists - it has all of the flaws in thinking exhibited by mainstream economists. Answering questions about what to do about economic problems within the current framework will not solve anything when the framework itself (all money is backed by debt, with interest payable to private banks) is the issue. There is some clear thinking, and an ability to at least question a few tenets of conventional economic thinking, but the author's lack of understanding of the Federal Reserve system and where treasury bonds go (abroad, for the most part) shows a failure to grasp one of the most basic issues in monetary reform. This book is a pitch for infinite borrowing and elimination of taxes, written in sound bites. If you enjoy being lectured to by a (very good) propogandist, this book is for you.

If, however, you have a genuine interest in monetary reform in a way that will benefit society in general (rather than a small sliver of the very wealthy), try Michael Rowbotham's 'The Grip of Death' or Ellen Hodgson Brown's 'The Web of Debt'. These will explain to you why we are in the economic mess we are in and what would really help to get us out of it. Questioning the framework itself is necessary. It was something that was possible throughout the 19th century but the American population went to sleep after the FED was created in 1913, assuming the status quo was then fixed.

Somehow, everyone wants to dabble in economics without training, even though few would try it in other professions. This book carries that idea to the extreme. The author has an MBA and an undergraduate marketing degree. He rejects and/or misstates virtually everything in macroeconomics in a way that a first-semester undergraduate economics student could shred. Among the many logical fallacies are his statement that because an economy requires money to grow, and because money is debt, and because a large economy requires more debt than anybody but the federal government could manage, this proves that the economy requires ever-growing federal debt. He frequently confuses correlation with causality when he compares various economic variables. He lists a number of statements that he claims are all false, even though they are not even controversial to anyone other than the author. One reviewer referred to him as a genius for understanding economics better than the mainstream economists. That certainly would be true. What are the odds that a guy with training in marketing and business administration would disprove all of the economic theory that evolved through centuries of economic research? It's certainly possible, but I wouldn't bet the farm on it, particularly in light of his logical fallacies and confusion over many of the institutional facts. Perhaps in his next book he will write a critique of modern medical research, with all of the answers that have eluded medical science over the centuries.

In a nutshell, this book's basic premise is that the government can create money at will. Therefore, the government should create all the money it wants and make us all rich. It doesn't take a PhD in economics to realize the absurdity of such a hypothesis. Freely printing money at will was tried before in this and other countries amd the results are always disasterous.