Table of Contents :

Foreword Satyajit Das
Introduction
Why Robinson Crusoe did Not Need Money
Gold is Useful Because it is Useless
The Merchant of Venice
The Bank of England
The Other Life of Isaac Newton
Paper Money during the Revolutions
How Bank of England Became a Central Bank
When the "Cooke" Crumbled
The Gold Rush
The Creature from Jekyll Island
Between the Wars
Conclusion

"A man hears what he wants to hear and disregards the rest", wrote singer and songwriter Paul Simon some decades back. Books on the current financial crisis which started in late 2008 are a tad like that. Until now they have tended to deal with certain aspects of the crisis without looking at the bigger picture of what really went wrong. That bigger picture of the ongoing financial crisis has now started to evolve. Easy Money hopes to capture this big picture.

The history of money and the financial system as it has evolved over the centuries stand at the heart of this endeavor. It explores the idea that the evolution of money over centuries has led to an easy money policy being followed by governments and central banks across the world, which in turn has fueled humongous Ponzi schemes, which have now started to unravel, bringing the whole world on the brink of a financial disaster. The book also explains how the lessons of the financial crisis have still not been learned and in trying to deal with it, governments across the world are making the same mistakes which led to the current crisis in the first place.