Since Gigi asked about this book today, and then graciously zapped me 2,100 sats for my review links (WILL THE STACKERS MATCH IT?!), I guess I'll feature it here too:
I started reading Edward Chancellor's great book The Price of Time when it came out in 2022 -- I believe I even had an ARC from the publisher... but I never finished it. Got distracted, etc. WHY?!
...well, it was kinda meandering about:
It’s often unclear where the book’s story takes us, which was why I kept putting it down so many times since it was published. Make no mistake, it’s a dense read and even denser topic, even though Chancellor’s excellent writing makes the journey somewhat less arduous.
It couldn't have been more timely, as the world went through a massive pump in inflation after a pretty unexpected money supply dump.
I wrote
Month after month, yields on Treasury bonds and bills kept creeping up, bank rates tripled, and suddenly a generation of savers and borrowers accustomed to rock-bottom rates, below-target inflation, and free money had their world turned upside down. To ask what interest is and what it’s doing in commercial and financial society moved from an abstract academic inquiry to very real conversations at dinner tables everywhere.
The 400-page journey that Chancellor takes us on is balanced and calm, yet powerful and extremely relevant. By his own introductory remarks, the book is fueled by “a Bastiat-like conviction that ultra-low interest rates were contributing to many of our current woes, whether the collapse of productivity growth, unaffordable housing, rising inequality, the loss of market competition, or financial fragility.”
THIS bit I really liked, and it's appropriate for us Bitcoiners now that treasury companies are running their own kind of Financialization play:
Sometimes he therefore sounds like your run-of-the-mill Marxist critic, lambasting all things financial from a deep hatred of the market process. Financialization has destabilized the American economy; banks are too large; exporting Treasuries and US dollars is the modern — monetary — equivalent of the Dutch disease, which has impoverished the worker and hollowed out American production. Then again, at low rates we all turn into idiots so it’s hard not to sympathize with at least some of those views. (It wasn’t “real capitalism,” we might say.) “Good times engender much fraud,” Victorian economist Walter Bagehot said, which, in the author’s modern retelling becomes “Easy money was dumb money.”
"And dumb money there was. He takes central bankers to task for their hubris, thinking they can manipulate a monetary and financial system they hardly understand."
ooho, and man, what a good quote:
the powerful message of the book is the “need to return to a world in which interest rates are set in the market, not by central bankers, because central bankers won’t have enough information and they’ll have their own preferences and they will make mistakes. Writing a book about interest rates is remarkably relevant when everyone is concerned with inflation, the Fed, and interest rates. It’s a blessing that what Chancellor produced is so market-friendly, and a tragedy that it’s so desperately needed.