Economic historians have made great progress in unraveling the causes of the Great Depression, but not until Scott Sumner came along has anyone explained the multitude of twists and turns the economy took. In The Midas Paradox: Financial Markets, Government Policy Shocks, and the Great Depression, Sumner offers his magnum opus--the first book to comprehensively explain both monetary and non-monetary causes of that cataclysm. Drawing on financial market data and contemporaneous news stories, Sumner shows that the Great Depression is ultimately a story of incredibly bad policymaking--by central bankers, legislators, and two presidents--especially mistakes related to monetary policy and wage rates. He also shows that macroeconomic thought has long been captive to a false narrative that continues to misguide policymakers in their quixotic quest to promote robust and sustainable economic growth. The Midas Paradox is a landmark treatise that solves mysteries that have long perplexed economic historians, and corrects misconceptions about the true causes, consequences, and cures of macroeconomic instability. Like Milton Friedman and Anna J. Schwartz's A Monetary History of the United States, 1867-1960, it is one of those rare books destined to shape all future research on the subject.

The first book-length work on market monetarism, written by its leading scholar. Is it possible that the consensus around what caused the 2008 Great Recession is almost entirely wrong? It’s happened before. Just as Milton Friedman and Anna Schwartz led the economics community in the 1960s to reevaluate its view of what caused the Great Depression, the same may be happening now to our understanding of the first economic crisis of the 21st century. Foregoing the usual relitigating of problems such as housing markets and banking crises, renowned monetary economist Scott Sumner argues that the Great Recession came down to one thing: nominal GDP, the sum of all nominal spending in the economy, which the Federal Reserve erred in allowing to plummet. The Money Illusion is an end-to-end case for this school of thought, known as market monetarism, written by its leading voice in economics. Based almost entirely on standard macroeconomic concepts, this highly accessible text lays the groundwork for a simple yet fundamentally radical understanding of how monetary policy can work best: providing a stable environment for a market economy to flourish.

"The long run is a misleading guide to current affairs. In the long run we are all dead." -John Maynard Keynes, A Tract on Monetary Reform (1923) A Tract on Monetary Reform (1923), by British economist John Maynard Keynes, is a masterly analysis of the world monetary situation at the beginning of the twentieth century. Keynes stated the importance of stable domestic prices and a stable currency for a strong economy, while arguing against the gold standard, which at that time was used for the US dollar and many other currencies. Britain abandoned the gold standard in 1931-after it had re-established it in 1925-and the United States abandoned the gold standard in 1933. A Tract on Monetary Reform is essential reading for anyone interested in Keynes' theories and for students of economics or economic history.

The untold story of how FDR did the unthinkable to save the American economy.

The United States suffers from a shortage of well-placed homes. This was true even at the peak of the housing boom in 2005. Using a broad array of evidence on housing inflation, income, migration, homeownership trends, and international comparisons, Shut Out demonstrates that high home prices have been largely caused by the constrained housing supply in a handful of magnet cities leading the new economy. The same phenomenon is occurring in leading countries across the globe. Gentrifying cities have become exclusionary bastions in the new postindustrial economy. The US housing bubble that peaked in 2005 is more accurately described as a refugee crisis than a credit bubble. Surging demand for limited urban housing triggered a spike of migration away from the magnet cities among households with moderate and lower incomes who could no longer afford to remain, causing a brief contagion of high prices in the cities where the migrants moved. In this book, author Kevin Erdmann observes that the housing bubble has been broadly and incorrectly attributed to various “excesses.” Policymakers and economists concluded that our key challenge was that we had built too many homes. This misdiagnosis of the problem, according to Erdmann, led to misguided public polices, which were the primary cause of the subsequent financial crisis. A sort of moral panic about supposed excesses in home lending and construction led to destabilizing monetary and regulatory decisions. As the economy slumped, a sense of fatalism prevented the government from responding appropriately to the worsening situation. Shut Out provides a much-needed correction to the causes and consequences of financial crises and secular stagnation.

A Globe and Mail Top 100 Book of the Year In this “engrossing must-read” by “Canada’s most accomplished popular historian” (Ellery Queen Mystery Magazine), the glittering life and brutal murder of Sir Harry Oakes is newly investigated. Murdered Midas is “superior true-crime writing” (The Globe and Mail). On an island paradise in 1943, Sir Harry Oakes, gold-mining tycoon, philanthropist and one of the richest men in the British Empire, is murdered. The news of his death surges across the English-speaking world, from London, the Imperial centre, to the remote Canadian mining town of Kirkland Lake in the Northern Ontario bush. The murder becomes celebrated as the crime of the century. The layers of mystery deepen as the involvement of Count Alfred de Marigny, Oakes’s son-in-law, comes into question. Also suspicious are the odd machinations of the governor of the Bahamas, the former King Edward VIII. But despite a sensational trial, no murderer is convicted. Rumours about Oakes’s missing fortune are unrelenting, and fascination with the story has persisted for decades. Award-winning biographer and popular historian Charlotte Gray explores the life of the man behind the scandal—from his early, hardscrabble days during the massive mineral rush in Northern Ontario, to the fabulous fortune he reaped from his own gold mine, to his grandiose gestures of philanthropy. And Gray brings fresh eyes to the bungled investigation and shocking trial on the remote colonial island, proposing an overlooked suspect in this long cold case. Murdered Midas is the story of the man behind the newspaper headlines, a man both admired and reviled who, despite great wealth and public standing, never experienced justice.

Exploring the forceful renewal of the boom-and-bust cycle after several decades of economic stability, this book is a research-based review of the factors that caused the 2008 recession. It offers cutting-edge diagnoses of the recession and prescriptions on how to boost the economy from leading economists. The book concentrates on the Federal Reserve and its leading role in creating the economic boom and recession of the 2000s. Aimed at professional economists and readers well versed in the basic workings of the economy, it includes innovative proposals on how to avoid future boom-and-bust cycles.