Introduction to money

There has probably never been a time when the ordinary citizen, the reasonably wide-awake and intelligent man in the street, has been as money-conscious as he is today. By the expression 'money-conscious' I do not mean either especially addicted to penny-counting or penny-pinching or especially greedy and materialistic, especially given to reckoning everything according to money's worth and despising everything that does not earn a money tag or show promise of bringing in money. Neither description would fit him particularly well. The money-con sciousness of the ordinary intelligent citizen today is rather a realization that money in general, the money system of his country and of the world, is something which can affect his standards, his freedom, his security and his general well-being, something separate from the fortunes of his particular trade or profession or his own personal qualities and luck as a bread winner. Fifty years ago, even twenty-five years ago, the only people who took an interest in the monetary system as a whole were professional economists and a sprinkling of particularly cranky cranks. There are more professional economists than there used to be, and there is no noticeable falling off in the supply of cranks; indeed, a number of cranks can triumphantly point to the recent findings of responsible theory and say 'Now what did I always tell you?' (To which the honest answer is 'One part of sense and ten parts of tommyrot; but we ought to have spotted that one part a long time ago.') The big change, however, is in the popular interest, outside the ranks of the specialists whether orthodox or heretic. Money and monetary policy, the banking system, the international exchanges, the whole machinery of credit, have got into politics; they are part, even if a rather fuzzily seen part, of the ordinary citizen's picture of the world. How and why this change has come about is one of the things which this book tries to explain. Its main purpose, however, is to make the picture clearer and to get the perspective right.