The Bitcoin Standard: The Decentralized Alternative to Central Banking

by Saifedean Ammous

With this background in mind, we can get a far clearer idea of modern monetary history than what is commonly taught in academic textbooks since the Keynesian deluge. The founding text of Monetarist thought is what is considered the definitive work of U.S. monetary history: The Monetary History of the United States by Milton Friedman and Anna Schwartz. A giant tome of 888 pages, the book is astounding in its ability to marshal endless facts, details, statistics, and analytical tools without once providing the unfortunate reader with an understanding of one key issue: the causes of financial crises and recessions. The fundamental flaw of Friedman and Schwartz's book is typical of modern academic scholarship: it is an elaborate exercise in substituting rigor for logic. The book systematically and methodically avoids ever questioning the causes of the financial crises that have affected the U.S. economy over a century, and instead inundates the reader with impressively researched data, facts, trivia, and minutiae.