Customer Reviews

The Rules of the Game: International Money and Exchange Rates

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This book is a fine reference for a mainstream neoclassical-Keynesian synthesis view of money and exchange rates. It's a good source for information about the arrangements that governed international trade under the various international agreements of the last 100 years or so.

I give the book three stars for some of its theoretical failures, which is first and foremost, a misunderstanding of the nature of money, and hence, of exchange rates. The book follows much of the economics field in treating money as a creature of the government. That is only the case in the last 35 years or so, which is a kind of radical experiment. Money does not exist because governments say so. If this were true, money could never have developed. Money is a medium of exchange which has everything to do with its status as a store of value. Governments cannot create an item that has value simply by a government seal. All over the world, fiat currencies have lost value rapidly, because the long-term historical value of paper money is zero. Exchange rates operate chaotically, because they depend on arbitrage in foreign exchange markets, but all fiat currencies are inexorably headed toward zero.

While this book is a good reference for how much of the economics field views money, I find it gives a misleading picture of the nature of money. I'd recommend Rothbard's "What has the government done to our money?" for a clearer picture.