Money Beyond Borders: Global Currencies from Croesus to Crypto
By: Barry Eichengreen – University of California, Berkeley
Doubts about the international dominance of the dollar are only growing amid worries about tariffs, political dysfunction, and fraying international alliances. Will the dollar continue to reign supreme? In Money Beyond Borders, the leading authority on international currencies, Barry Eichengreen, puts the dollar’s prospects in deep historical perspective by chronicling the entire history of cross-border currencies, from the invention of coins in the seventh century BCE to the cryptocurrencies of today and the central bank digital currencies of tomorrow.
Money Beyond Borders recounts how Greek and Roman coins became the first true international currencies. It tells how the Florentine gold florin became the “greenback of the Renaissance,” and how it was succeeded by Spanish silver and a Dutch fiat currency. The book explains why the British pound dominated the international economy in the nineteenth century, why the dollar rose to the top during World War II, and why the dollar has survived predictions of the imminent loss of its preeminence since the 1970s.
The long history of international currencies shows that the same factors that encourage their widespread use eventually lead to their abandonment. Money Beyond Borders makes a powerful case that the dollar is now on the downside of this cycle, and it considers who the winners and losers will be when there is flight away from the greenback. Revealing important patterns in the life cycles of international currencies over the past 2,500 years, the book offers valuable lessons and insights about how currencies rise—and why they fall.
Nordic Capitalism – Lessons for Realizing Sustainable Capitalism
By: Robert Gavin Strand – University of California, Berkeley
Nordic Capitalism shows how democratic capitalism supports freedom, shared prosperity, and sustainability through a comparative analysis of Nordic and American capitalisms. Drawing on real-world examples and personal experience, Robert Gavin Strand distills ten core lessons from the Nordic context to advance a more just, dignified, and sustainable form of capitalism. He examines how Nordic nations consistently lead in the Sustainable Development Goals (SDGs) rankings and societal well-being indicators, and how Nordic companies frequently top sustainability and stakeholder performance rankings. Challenging the assertion that there is ‘no alternative’ to American-style capitalism rooted in neoliberalism, he dispels the mischaracterization of Nordic societies as ‘socialist.’ Blending rigorous scholarship with compelling storytelling, this book speaks to scholars, business leaders, policymakers, students, and concerned citizens. The Nordic variety of capitalism serves as a North Star – offering practical guidance and hope for realizing sustainable capitalism. This title is also available as open access on Cambridge Core. (Open Access)
Central Banking and Sustainability
Edited by: Kern Alexander, Seraina Grünewald – University of Zürich, University of St. Gallen
Sustainability matters increasingly affect and concern central banks around the globe, while the perception of what they are legally empowered to do may differ depending on the jurisdiction at hand. This volume systematically assesses the role of central banks in matters of sustainability from different perspectives in academia and central banking practice – some more favourable of a proactive engagement of central banks in sustainability policies, others more critical and vigilant of legal and legitimacy boundaries of such engagement. The methodological approaches the authors deploy include legal-doctrinal analysis, qualitative empirical analysis, and economic theory. The essays together provide a balanced assessment of the role central banks can and should play in sustainability matters, addressing legal aspects, legitimacy concerns, and concerns of interinstitutional balance as well as economic and operational considerations. The book covers both developed and developing economies, where central banks are already facing the dire consequences of the warming climate.
Asset Bubbles and Macroeconomic Policy
By: Gadi Barlevy – Federal Reserve Bank of Chicago
The existing models of asset bubbles—assets whose price exceeds the present discounted value of the dividends these assets are expected to pay out—have been used to explain various episodes of asset boom-and-busts, ranging from those of the eighteenth century to the present day, including the dot-com and housing booms of the last 25 years.
In Asset Bubbles and Macroeconomic Policy, Gadi Barlevy begins by describing historical examples of asset boom-and-busts that prompted economists to be interested in modeling bubbles and then goes on to discuss impossibility results, or situations in which asset bubbles cannot occur. The book then proceeds to discuss various scenarios in which these impossibility results do not apply (and bubbles are possible). These scenarios include bubbles associated with dynamic inefficiency, credit market frictions, private information, subjective beliefs, and risk-shifting. For each of these different explanations, the book discusses specific models to illustrate how a bubble can occur, the empirical predictions of those models, and implications for policy.
From the tulip mania to crypto, bubbles are a recurrent and fascinating phenomenon. They raise fundamental issues about the environment in which they appear, the nature of asset markets, the formation of expectations. The book by Gadi Barlevy does a superb job of presenting complex issues in a transparent way.
Olivier Blanchard, MIT
