Money: The True Story of a Made-Up Thing by Jacob Goldstein
I am Thijs. I enjoy reading (maybe a little too much) and being outdoors. I have a younger brother and my favorite dessert is root beer floats.
Money, a seemingly simple concept that I have always taken for granted. But what really is it and how have we all agreed that it has value? This book explores the early origins of money through more complicated concepts like FIAT, Commercial paper, Bitcoin and many other forms of money that has always confused me. This book will help you understand better how our economy works, banks were originated, the first stocks ever made, and other financial concepts. I believe that every reader could learn at least a thing or two about money from this book.
One of the craziest things that I learned was that on June 5, 1933 the U.S. left the gold standard. The gold standard is when money is backed by gold so if you wanted to, you could trade in your money in for gold. This could cause a lot of problems because if people wanted their gold all at the same time there wouldn’t be enough gold to be distributed. This happened in 1929 and helped trigger the Great Depression. As a result of leaving the Gold Standard in 1933, today money is backed by nothing. This means that money is only worth something because we think it is. That means if we all stop believing it is worth something it will not be worth anything.
The book “Money A Real Story About a Made-Up Thing” goes into the depth of all this. It would be a great book for people from the age 18 and up who want to learn about this complicated thing that our whole life revolves around. It is what we give up our time for to earn and then spend for necessities, and what we value. I bet this book will teach you a lot. I recommended it to my dad, and he loved it. So have fun reading this wonderful book Money: The True Story of a Made-Up Thing.
