Money and Empire

This book started out as a biography of the dollar, not of a man. It was intended to be an international version of the story I had told in The New Lombard Street: How the Fed Became the Dealer of Last Resort (2011). That book was a biography of the Fed, as seen through the analytical lens of the money view, an approach to monetary theory that I had been developing in the classroom for the previous decade. The new project was supposed to extend the money view to a theory of foreign exchange and the international monetary system and in doing so would enable the story of the emerging market-based credit system to encompass the story of financial globalization and the spreading dollar system. As in the previous book, I planned a story of institutional development as context for a story of economic thought development, this time international rather than domestic. Fortunately for me, my plan attracted support from the initial grant round of the fledgling Institute for New Economic Thinking (INET), which I gratefully acknowledge. But already in the first year the project began to change shape, and I decided not to request renewal–