THE CONFIDENCE TRICK: A Five-Thousand-Year History of Money, Trust, and the Promises We Call Wealth
M. Muñoz
M. Muñoz
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126
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About this ebook
On a September morning in 2007, retirees with folding chairs and thermos flasks lined up outside a British bank to withdraw every last penny. Nothing had been stolen and nothing had burned; people had simply stopped believing. The Confidence Trick uses that morning as a doorway into five thousand years of monetary history, arguing that money was never a thing at all, but a shared act of belief recorded on whatever surface a civilization had at hand: clay tablets in ancient Mesopotamia, stone discs on a Pacific island, silver coins stamped by Croesus, paper receipts issued by London goldsmiths, and now lines of cryptographic code. Readers will follow the silver that impoverished the empire that mined it, the goldsmiths who discovered how to lend money they did not have, the Sunday in 1971 when the dollar cut its last tie to gold, and the hyperinflations that taught entire nations to weigh banknotes instead of counting them. Grounded in real history rather than theory, this book explains what a banknote, a bank balance, and a bitcoin actually have in common, and why the oldest trick in economic history still runs every payment made today.
On a September morning in 2007, retirees with folding chairs and thermos flasks lined up outside a British bank to withdraw every last penny. Nothing had been stolen and nothing had burned; people had simply stopped believing. The Confidence Trick uses that morning as a doorway into five thousand...
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