Customer Reviews

Storage and Stability: A Modern Ever-Normal Granary (Benjamin Graham Classics)

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Benjamin Graham certainly is one of our century's most important financier and self-thought economist. After the great depression, Graham reenginered his way of investing and his way of looking the world. After suffering the debacle, he made value investing and value thinking the most important things in his life. The book is the proposal for a new monetary system, which uses an index of commodities as it's core backing for the issuance of currency. Graham's idea isn't revolutionary, because as he tells us , the granary system has been used throught men's history. The philosophical foundation of the proposal lies in that the surplus of commodities should'nt represent a disgrace, instead it should represent wealth. As economists know, when there is an overproduction of commodities prices tend to decrease, so why plenty relates to disgrace. If the government stored the surplus of commodities and used the as the backing of the issuance of currency, this problem can be allevianted. The book is easy and fun to read, and shows the genious of the dean of Wall Steet

Graham's book is very well written and goes at an easy pace, while not becoming boring. It is a fertile field of ideas. His commodity buffer stock idea could be a real solution for today's global problems of increasing financial instability and growing inequality. Deregulation has removed almost all government automatic stabilizers. Graham's idea is ultimately an international stabilization policy particulary relevant to the European Union and the Third World.

While this book was written in 1936, and buffer stock ideas have been around for centuries, his monetary forumlation of the buffer stock is a policy still ahead of its time.