Recommended literature

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Money is a vast topic. If you wish to dive deeper into the various questions surrounding the creation of money and redistribution of wealth and into reflections from both theory and practice, the MONNETA editorial team recommends:

The End of Money and the Future of Civilization by Thomas Greco, 2009 Written in the wake of the global financial crash of 2008, this is an ambitious book with a grand title designed to get attention. Thomas Greco brings decades of accumulated knowledge and experience of money systems to his account of money, power […]

The Lost Science of Money, Stephen Zarlenga, American Monetary Institute, 2002 This is a polemical book which starts with the assumption of the philosopher Aristotle that “money…exists not by nature, but by law” and “it is in our power to change it and make it useless“. The whole book is a monetary reform tract, which […]

Bernard Lietaer published his book in 2001 and it has since then become one of the most influential books on people looking for alternatives to the dominant mono-currency financial system. Events since then, in particular the global financial crisis of 2008, have only served to confirm the main ideas of the book: That the world […]

Margrit Kennedy’s first book on money, translated into 22 languages. This book describes how money works. It reveals the reasons for the persistent fluctuation of one of our most important measuring tools and shows how money not only “makes the world go round” but also how it continuously causes destructive crises. It demonstrates how the […]

A History of Money by Glyn Davies, University of Wales Press, 1994 This book has become a standard reference work for students of monetary history. Beginning with the earliest developments of money and barter known to anthropologists, the book traces the many twists and turns of money and banking through the centuries up to the […]

Money: whence it came, where it went, John Kenneth Galbraith, 1975 JK Galbraith was an erudite and witty American economist who, in another book “The Affluent Society” coined the famous phrase “private wealth and public squalor” to describe American society in the 1950s. In this book, Galbraith selects scenes from monetary history to describe how […]

The Guernsey Experiment, pamphlet by Olive and Jan Grubiak, 1960 This pamphlet describes a historically interesting, successful and still relevant local monetary reform on the island of Guernsey from the year 1816 onwards. After the Napoleonic Wars, Guernsey was in dire straits. Roads being washed away by the sea desperately needed repairing. Unemployment and poverty […]