I (almost) never stop reading books I’ve decided to engage with, and I certainly don’t review them until I’m done (eeh: #1224751). I put them away, sometimes for months or years at a time, always intending to come back to them.

Larry Lepard, an excellent analyst and fund manager whose goldbug-to-bitcoin story is fantastic, released a big orange book last year, The Big Print: What Happened to America and How Sound Money Will Fix It.

I got it straight away when it was released in February 2025 and delved in — and three days later, some fifty pages in, I put it away. Tried two more times in March and made it precisely to the one-third mark… and didn’t look at it again for a year. I thought it shallow and boring, but sometimes that just means I’m not the intended audience.

Here’s what I wrote to a goldbug friend who asked my opinion of the book at the time:

“I really didn't like The Big Print... couldn't finish it. Chapters were too short, too shallow and underdeveloped. No overarching story, really, and no meandering path to follow”“I really didn't like The Big Print... couldn't finish it. Chapters were too short, too shallow and underdeveloped. No overarching story, really, and no meandering path to follow”

What Lepard does is that he writes things that are somewhere in the wheelhouse of true, but usually inaccurate and missing important context. That works OK for clickbaity online content or lectures where you gotta be brief and paint an overarching picture, but not for a serious, investigative, argumentative book; nobody but the people who already 110% agree with you will get anything out of it.

The purpose of a book is to be more accurate, more in-depth, more precise, and more evidence-heavy than you can in a newsletter, an investor brief, a podcast, or a lecture. On a Twitter Spaces it’s OK as a shorthand just say “Keynesians” or “They printed the money,” or “Wars are funded by money printing” with everyone knowing roughly what you mean. But in a book — a carefully, well-researched, serious attempt at describing our broken monetary world — you can’t be that sloppy.

You can’t misspelled Hayek’s name (“Frederick Hayek”) or cap (=make into proper nouns) every goddamn word in the dictionary (Economics, Cantillon Effect, Balance sheet, Austrian Economic model, Fed Chairmen, “The Fund I manage…”, “the Housing Bubble”, Deficit), or mistake “classical economists” for “classical liberals.”

Oh, but maybe I’m just an extremely rigorous, detail-oriented (psychopathic?!) editor who knows enough about money, bitcoin, banks, and the monetary system to be annoying af?

Sure, true, but still. Be better.

So, the other day I looked at the unfinished segment of my bookshelf (#1414732), saw this orange-colored monstrosity and thought “hey, I guess it’s time.” I’ve heard him eloquently and passionately say good things in public appearances, and I met him last summer so I had a better impression of him… I’ve got another two-hundred pages to go...

Over a couple of days I made it about fifty more pages before I’d had enough. This is unreadable trash.

Material errors:Material errors:

• Bait-and-switch between negative interest on deposits (which happened for some time for bank reserves in the eurozone system) and negative yields on government bonds, an artifice of financial market trades. Confusing debt and deficits; money printing and debt.
• Correctly walks us through the methodological impossibilities of constructing an accurate consumer price basket over time — and then proceeds to approvingly quote and graph ShadowStats, which is just the official CPI + a wholly inappropriate constant.
• No, 0% required reserves didn't mean banks could buy infinite number of Treasuries — even if your textbook model (1/RR) spit out infinity on the other end (actually, divide by zero -> undefined, right @SimpleStacker??); banks hold positive reserves for other reasons, and the formal requirement has long since stopped binding banks.
• Thinking that the economics profession went from classical liberals economists to Keynes is incorrect and materially important — and if you’ve been following along the Tyler Cowen chapter reviews (#1471628, #1470476, #1470120) you know this is false. It’s confusing because Keynes himself called the marginalists he was attacking “classical”; but yea, if you arrived five minutes ago and just looked at this briefly, you wouldn’t know that, and so you end up propagating falsehoods.
• While it’s nice to talk about the nonsense that is MMT (the “mystical monetary theory”, modern monetary trash), it’s a complete red herring for analyzing real-world Fed policy — Stephanie Kelton is emphatically not on the FOMC, and no mainstream economist takes their stuff seriously. That Fed officials do things in crises that do, somehow, sometimes kind of look like MMT is not even remotely the same as MMT running the show; stop talking about it.
• An increase in M2 by 41% between pre-pandemic (Jan 2020) and peak inflation (April 2022) does not constitute “forty percent of all dollars in existence were created in response to COVID” (p. 128). I leave it to the ~math people and middle school teachers here to explain what’s wrong with that (and plenty of people, Scaramucci #733580 and Saifedean included, make such errors)
• You can claim that M2 increasing by x% means an x% reduction in the “value of [dollar holders’] savings,” which seems reasonable if you think about fiat money as stock dilution in an efficient financial market, but makes no sense when you realize that cash is spent for goods and services in the real economy, and so what matters for "reduction in value" for stagnant cash-holdings is (nominal) prices... and relatively to assets/wages for invested savings and earnings.

Let’s finish with something nice… Lepard’s story of monetary mismanagement and the horrors of the Fed and fiat money is essentially correct — it’s just poorly presented, poorly argued, poorly thought-through.

Here is one educational nugget I particularly liked (p. 45).

“mixing money and politics is dangerous and is at the heart of our monetary instability” (p. 38)“mixing money and politics is dangerous and is at the heart of our monetary instability” (p. 38)

TL;DR (actually…), the book is trite, superficial, derivative, and unnecessarily and insultingly ranting when it doesn’t need to be and, given the ambition of the author's case, shouldn’t be. Just listen to Lepard on WBD or a conference lecture; ignore the book.