The Future of Money: How the Digital Revolution Is Transforming Currencies and Finance
by Eswar S. Prasad
ISBN 13: 978-0674293892
Book description

An Economist Book of the Year A Financial Times Book of the Year A Foreign Affairs Book of the Year A ProMarket Book of the Year One of The Week ’s Ten Best Business Books of the Year “A road map for money managers, market strategists, and others seeking to understand this new world.”― Barron’s “Money shapes economies, economies shape nations, nations shape history. It follows that the future of money is profoundly important. Here is a definitive report on where we are and where we are going.”―Lawrence H. Summers, former Secretary of the Treasury “Prasad manages to make the financial system intelligible and interesting without resorting to shortcuts and exaggeration…Previous overhauls mainly improved existing systems, he notes. The end of cash―likely within a decade or two―is revolutionary.”― The Economist The world of finance is on the cusp of a major disruption that will affect corporations, bankers, states―indeed, all of us. As Eswar Prasad makes clear, the end of physical cash will fundamentally rewrite how we live. Bitcoin, Ethereum, and other cryptocurrencies are just the beginning: spurred by their emergence, central banks will increasingly develop their own, more stable digital currencies. Meanwhile, cryptocurrencies themselves will evolve dramatically as global corporations like Meta, Apple, and Amazon join the game. Prasad shows how these innovations will redefine the very concept of money, unbundling its traditional functions. This transformation promises greater efficiency and flexibility, but also carries the risk of instability, lack of accountability, and erosion of privacy. A lucid, visionary work, The Future of Money shows how to maximize the best and guard against the worst of what is to come.


Recommended on 1 episode:

Can the West Stop Russia by Strangling its Economy?
There’s the Russia-Ukraine war that’s easy to follow in the news right now. We can watch Russian bombs falling on Ukraine, see Russian tanks smoking on the side of the road, hear from Ukrainian resistance fighters livestreaming their desperate defense. But there’s another theater to this war that’s harder to see, but may well decide the outcome: the economic war that West is waging on Russia. Europe and the United States initially responded with a limited set of sanctions but then expanded them into a counterattack capable of crushing the Russian economy. Vladimir Putin, for one, understands the danger: As the force of the West’s measures multiplied, he readied his nuclear forces in a bid to warn Europe and the United States off. This is terrifying territory. So I asked Adam Tooze — a brilliant economic historian, the director of the European Institute at Columbia, and the author of the indispensable “Chartbook” newsletter — to explain how the war in the financial markets is shaping the war in streets of Ukraine. What he gave me was a whole new way to see how Putin had readied his country for conflict, the leverage that Russia’s energy exports gave it, how the dreams of the globalizers had cracked, and what the West both was and wasn’t doing in response. But this is two conversations, not one. On Friday, Tooze and I recorded just as the war began. That was a conversation about the economics of the war as both Russia and the West understood it when the bombing began. But on Monday, we spoke again, because so much had changed. Rather than splice the two discussions into an artificial omniscience, I’ve linked them, because I think they reveal more in sequence: They show how fast this war is reshaping the politics around it, how quickly the escalation is coming, how rapidly the plans are crumbling. So we discuss the sanctions that the West has deployed against Russia, how Europe’s dependence on Russian energy exports undermined the West’s response, what Putin understood about the dark side of economic interdependence, how Ukraine’s remarkable resistance — and the remarkable leadership of its president, Volodymyr Zelensky — reshaped the politics and policies in the West, how this war could alter the geopolitical calculus of China and Taiwan, the new economic order that is emerging, and more.
Adam Tooze March 1, 2022 3 books recommended
View
by @zachbellay