Globalizing Capital

What Hacker News says

1. starwindFeb 2022
   Warning: arguments over monetary policy are generally much more subtle than “hawks vs doves.”

   If you want a book that covers different views of monetary policy, you need a textbook that's likely to be math-heavy and assume a background in theory. Carl Walsh's Monetary Theory and Policy is good but hard.

   If you want something readable, start with Friedman and Schwartz's The Great Contraction which deals with monetary issue around the Great Depression.

   Barry Eichengreen did a good book with Globalizing Capital that deals with more recent times from a more Keynesian view. (I should say, Keynes himself was very readable and you can find seeds of Monetarism in the General Theory.)

   The Austrians' economics is a lot more religious than rigorous (Hayek himself said he was wrong and Friedman was right about the Great Depression). If you want something well done and rigorous but very critical of the Fed through a libertarian lens, look to Allan Meltzer’s History of the Federal Reserve (the two volumes run about 1500 pages). You can probably sample chapters of it.

   I never read his book, but Scott Sumner is one of the best economists in the market monetarist school of thought, and with its emphasis on nominal gdp targeting it very much cuts against the grain.

   For other good, contemporary economists focusing on monetary policy: John Taylor, Stanley Fischer, and Ben Bernanke

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2. FiberBundleMar 2020
   Take a look at the Economics & Finance videos on Khan Academy [1]. I have only watched some of them, but those I watched were good.

   You could read some standard macroeconomics textbooks, but I'd advise against doing that, since they are expensive and unnecessarily formalized using elementary math, which doesn't really add anything to the material itself. There's however a good book on monetary economics by Mishkin called Economics of Money, Banking and Financial Markets, which is really good, but the Khan Academy videos on banking mostly cover the same material.

   Personally I've learned a lot from reading economic history. Some books I can recommend are: Eichengreen - Globalizing Capital: A History of the International Monetary System

   Frieden - Global Capitalism: Its Fall and Rise in the Twentieth Century

   Soros - Alchemy of Finance (skip the first couple of chapters on his reflexivity theory, but the 'diary' chapters are a gold mine)

   Ferguson - The Ascent of Money (probably a good book to start, the others might be harder to completely grasp for a beginner)

   Some other good book I can recommend (not history books) are: The Secrets of Economic Indicators: Hidden Clues to Future Economic Trends and Investment Opportunities by Baumohl

   Inside the House of Money by Drobny (mostly about global macro trading, but you would learn a lot about economics along the way, would only recommend this after having built up some basic knowledge though)

   Most importantly you should start reading the Economist, which has really high quality economics and finance articles, but is released only weekly and offers a good trade off with regards to time commitment and knowledge about what's going on in the world. Note that you will probably need to know some basics in order to understand everything, but you can look up things along the way. Economics really isn't hard to learn if you have a technical background.

   [1] https://www.youtube.com/user/khanacademy/playlists?view=50&s...

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