People's ability to think is often paralyzed in the face of overwhelming information and a myriad of opinions. Critical data is drowned out by noise data, important details are confused by minutiae, deeper pathologies are confused by superficial pathologies, core reasoning is tied up in trivial logic, analysis loses its bearings and judgment goes astray. Ultimately, the illusion displaces the truth. This is particularly true in the economic sphere. Five years after the end of the financial crisis in 2008, views on the future course of the world economy are still divided. Has the U.S. quantitative easing been effective or not? Is the global currency overshoot a blessing or a curse? Are financial markets becoming safer, or more dangerous? Has the economic recovery been steady or short-lived? In short, is the world gradually moving away from the last recession, or is it accelerating its slide to the next crisis? All the activities that mankind has ever engaged in have always revolved around two most basic tasks, one of which is the creation of wealth and the other is the distribution of wealth, from which all other activities are derived. Whether creating wealth or distributing it, human greed has been the source of their ultimate energy since the beginning. The "good in greed" drives technological advances that save energy, reduce time, reduce intensity, and increase pleasure, resulting in a continuous increase in productivity and more prosperous wealth creation. However, the insatiable greed of greed can inspire trickery, speculation, fraud, quick gains and extravagance, which in turn stifle productivity progress, lead to a distorted distribution of wealth and reduce the economic vitality of society.

This book will follow the main line of world reserve currency hegemony, starting with the deliberate overthrow of the pound sterling hegemony by the US dollar, showing how the US monetary strategy masters have gradually eroded the pound sterling power, squeezed the pound sterling's international reserve currency status and trade settlement pricing power, and how the pound sterling power has counterattacked the US dollar through the "imperial preference system", and returned the US dollar to its original "isolationist" form. The fierce struggle between the dollar and the pound created a vacuum of world financial power in the 1930s that exacerbated the Great Depression worldwide. The Second World War provided a historic opportunity for the dollar to eradicate the pound, and the Atlantic Charter and the Lend-Lease Act were all sharp scalpels in Roosevelt's hands, aimed at dismembering the British Empire's pound. Eventually, the United States established a "Bretton Woods dynasty" with a dollar-based system as regent by "holding gold hostage to the vassals". The basis of interest in the "China-America" economic marriage is fracturing and disintegrating. America's tolerance for China's booming economy was originally based on the model of Chinese production, American enjoyment, Chinese savings, American consumption. China's future economic transformation will inevitably require a shift in the main resources of the national economy from being tilted towards overseas markets to being tilted towards domestic markets, thereby reducing savings exports to the United States. This process would change the basic U.S. position of continuing to tolerate China's economic growth.

In 1971, President Nixon imposed national price controls and took the United States off the gold standard, an extreme measure intended to end an ongoing currency war that had destroyed faith in the U.S. dollar. Today we are engaged in a new currency war, and this time the consequences will be far worse than those that confronted Nixon. Currency wars are one of the most destructive and feared outcomes in international economics. At best, they offer the sorry spectacle of countries' stealing growth from their trading partners. At worst, they degenerate into sequential bouts of inflation, recession, retaliation, and sometimes actual violence. Left unchecked, the next currency war could lead to a crisis worse than the panic of 2008. Currency wars have happened before-twice in the last century alone-and they always end badly. Time and again, paper currencies have collapsed, assets have been frozen, gold has been confiscated, and capital controls have been imposed. And the next crash is overdue. Recent headlines about the debasement of the dollar, bailouts in Greece and Ireland, and Chinese currency manipulation are all indicators of the growing conflict. As James Rickards argues in Currency Wars, this is more than just a concern for economists and investors. The United States is facing serious threats to its national security, from clandestine gold purchases by China to the hidden agendas of sovereign wealth funds. Greater than any single threat is the very real danger of the collapse of the dollar itself. Baffling to many observers is the rank failure of economists to foresee or prevent the economic catastrophes of recent years. Not only have their theories failed to prevent calamity, they are making the currency wars worse. The U. S. Federal Reserve has engaged in the greatest gamble in the history of finance, a sustained effort to stimulate the economy by printing money on a trillion-dollar scale. Its solutions present hidden new dangers while resolving none of the current dilemmas. While the outcome of the new currency war is not yet certain, some version of the worst-case scenario is almost inevitable if U.S. and world economic leaders fail to learn from the mistakes of their predecessors. Rickards untangles the web of failed paradigms, wishful thinking, and arrogance driving current public policy and points the way toward a more informed and effective course of action.

Currency, which has been overlooked by historians, is precisely the key to unlocking many historical puzzles, the compass to discern the maze of today's reality, and the telescope to discover the road to the future. In the course of studying the financial history of Europe, America, China and Japan, I have a growing feeling that finance is the "fourth dimensional frontier" that a sovereign country must defend. The concept of the frontiers of sovereign states does not only include the three-dimensional physical space constituted by the land, sea and air frontiers (including space), but in the future it needs to include a new dimension: finance. The importance of the financial high frontier will become increasingly important in the coming era of cloudy international currency wars. From the path of financial evolution in Europe and the United States, it can be clearly found that the currency standard, central banks, financial networks, trading markets, financial institutions and clearing centers together constitute the system architecture of financial high frontier. The main purpose of this system is to ensure efficient and secure resource mobilization for currency pairs. From the source of the central bank to create money, to the customer terminal that eventually accepts money; from the dense network of money flow, to the clearing center of funds remittance; from the trading market of financial instruments, to the rating system of credit assessment; from the soft regulation of the financial legal system, to the construction of rigid financial infrastructure; from the huge financial institutions, to efficient industry associations; from complex financial products, to simple investment instruments, the financial high frontier protects the monetary blood from the heart of the central bank, to the financial capillaries and even the whole body economic cells, and eventually back to the central bank's circulation system.

Money, by its very nature, is a claim to wealth, and people hold money, the equivalent of a receipt for holding wealth. What is wealth? What form of wealth is used to issue money as collateral determines the nature of the currency. The most widely accepted form of wealth is currency. Wealth, but also currency, is the fruit of human labour. The commodity property of the commons is, in essence, the property of labour. Over the 5,000 years of human civilization, more than 2,000 commodities have taken on the role of currency, and the market has evolved to phase out other currencies, eventually choosing gold and silver as the ultimate representatives of wealth. No matter what region, no matter what civilization, no matter what religion, gold and silver formed the currency as the most widely accepted form of wealth. The gold and silver at this time is both the claim to wealth and the wealth itself. Even though people have gradually forgotten the gold behind the paper money receipts in the long process of being brainwashed, gold, after all, restricts the over-issuance of receipts, because when there are too many receipts, sooner or later people will be interested in the gold that these receipts can claim. Bankers, as the rule makers of the money game, did not like gold as collateral for paper money, either because it was not enough to satisfy the inflation of paper money desires, or because it did not generate interest income. The idea that bankers would prefer to replace gold with an asset that would never run out and would be viable is a tempting one, and after 1971, the demonetization of gold was in fact an unequal treaty unilaterally imposed on others by the rule-makers of the money game. Thus, we were introduced to an entirely new form of money: sovereign credit money.

A powerful new understanding of global currency trends, including the rise of the Chinese yuan At first glance, the history of the modern global economy seems to support the long-held view that the currency of the world’s leading power invariably dominates international trade and finance. But in How Global Currencies Work, three noted economists overturn this conventional wisdom. Offering a new history of global finance over the past two centuries and marshaling extensive new data to test current theories of how global currencies work, the authors show that several national monies can share international currency status—and that their importance can change rapidly. They demonstrate how changes in technology and international trade and finance have reshaped the landscape of international currencies so that several international financial standards can coexist. In fact, they show that multiple international and reserve currencies have coexisted in the past—upending the traditional view of the British pound’s dominance before 1945 and the U.S. dollar’s postwar dominance. Looking forward, the book tackles the implications of this new framework for major questions facing the future of the international monetary system, including how increased currency competition might affect global financial stability.

This paper reviews the literature on financial crises focusing on three specific aspects. First, what are the main factors explaining financial crises? Since many theories on the sources of financial crises highlight the importance of sharp fluctuations in asset and credit markets, the paper briefly reviews theoretical and empirical studies on developments in these markets around financial crises. Second, what are the major types of financial crises? The paper focuses on the main theoretical and empirical explanations of four types of financial crises—currency crises, sudden stops, debt crises, and banking crises—and presents a survey of the literature that attempts to identify these episodes. Third, what are the real and financial sector implications of crises? The paper briefly reviews the short- and medium-run implications of crises for the real economy and financial sector. It concludes with a summary of the main lessons from the literature and future research directions.