Book

Edward A. Tenenbaum and the Deutschmark

How an American Jew Became the Father of Germany’s Postwar Economic Revival

• Author(s): Carl Ludwig Holtfrerich
• ISBN: 9781009492829

• October, 2024

Ludwig Erhard’s authorship of the West German currency reform of 1948 is a central founding myth of today’s German Federal Republic and, especially, the country’s biggest political party, the Christian Democratic Union. Erhard’s role as the chief engineer of the postwar German economic miracle and the country’s post-war prosperity is celebrated everywhere – in economic doctrine, party politics, schools, and the mass media.

This new book by one of Germany’s foremost economic historians offers a devastating critique of what everyone has believed for the last seventy years. Carl-Ludwig Holtfrerich’s Edward A. Tenenbaum and the Deutschmark. How an American Jew became the Father of Germany’s Postwar Economic Revival shows that the real author of the currency reform was not Erhard, but an American-Polish Jew, Edward A. Tenenbaum.

The book traces how Erhard, the popular first and long-time economics minister of the Federal Republic of Germany and from 1963 to 1966 successor of Konrad Adenauer as its chancellor, went about claiming the credit for himself. Although the West German central bank, founded before the reform, and German currency experts who had cooperated with Tenenbaum in preparing the reform legislation knew better, they did little to expose Erhard’s brazen theft of Tenenbaum’s merit. It was as late as 1998, the 50^th anniversary of the introduction of the Deutschmark, that the Bundesbank acknowledged Tenenbaum’s central role in official speeches in public and also by having Tenenbaum’s widow participate as a guest of honor in ceremonies in Frankfurt and in the Currency Reform Museum in Rothwesten.

It was in the Museum building, at the time a barracks building on an American airfield, where Tenenbaum and eleven German currency experts designed the reform legislation and all the forms and information sheets accompanying it. But Tenenbaum’s pivotal role in managing the currency reform has remained largely unknown among the German public.

The study throws shocking new light on Erhard’s Nazi past and many aspects of postwar German economic policy. Holtfrerich was the first researcher to use the files the CIA had collected on Ludwig Erhard in the post-WW-II period in the National Archives. He found revealing assessments of Erhard’s personality. But it took his breath away when he discovered Ludwig Erhard right behind Adolf Eichmann in an alphabetical list of the worst German Nazi criminals.

The concluding thesis of the book is that Erhard got away with his theft of the currency-reform merit from Tenenbaum because the latter was Jewish. After having been indoctrinated during the twelve years of Hitler’s dictatorship that the Jews were responsible for all evils in German history, the German population for decades after WWII was not ready to acknowledge credit for their postwar ‘economic miracle’ to a Jew. Other cases of persistent German anti-Semitism, especially from the early 1950s, corroborate Holtfrerich’s thesis.

Edward A. Tenenbaum and the Deutschmark. How an American Jew became the Father of Germany’s Postwar Economic Revival, published as part of the Institute for New Economic Thinking’s book series with Cambridge University Press, is certain to lead to drastic revisions of many contentious points in German and American economic history.

Carl-Ludwig Holtfrerich is Professor of Economics and Economic History at John F. Kennedy Institute for North American Studies of the Freie Universität Berlin. He is the author of The Great German Inflation 1914 to 1923 (1986) and has published extensively on business and banking history as well as domestic and foreign economic-policy issues. He is a recipient of The Financial Times/Booz-Allen & Hamilton Global Business Book Award and the Helmut Schmidt Prize in German-American Economic History at the German Historical Institute in Washington DC.

Book

Power and Inequality

A Reformist Perspective

• Author(s): Alessandro Roncaglia
• ISBN: 978-1-00-937052-3

• January 2024

Power is a broad and complex concept that cuts across all fields in the humanities and social sciences. Written by a leading historian of economic thought, Power and Inequality presents a wide-ranging and multi-disciplinary analysis of power as an economic and social issue. Its aim is not to formulate a new abstract theory of power but rather to illustrate the different ways in which power is used to exacerbate social and economic inequality. Issues such as division of labour and its evolution, different forms of capitalism up to the money-manager economy, the role of networks (from the family to masonic lodges and the mafia), the state and the international arena, culture and the role of the masses are considered. The analysis of these elements, causing inequalities of various kinds, is a prerequisite for devising progressive policy strategies aiming at a reduction of inequalities through a strategy of reforms.

==> Provides readers with a wide-ranging view of the constraints and possibilities of action for reducing inequalities

==> Introduces the topic step-by-step using ordinary-language explanations and references to real-world issues making the theory accessible to readers without specialized training in economics, sociology or politics

==> Includes inter-disciplinary and multi-disciplinary perspectives, showing how different disciplines can interact

Lynn Parramore's interview with Alessandro Roncaglia

Book

Money and Empire

Charles P. Kindleberger and the Dollar System

• Author(s): Perry G. Mehrling
• ISBN: 9781009178518

• October 2022

Charles Kindleberger ranks as one of the twentieth century’s best-known and most influential international economists. This book traces the evolution of his thinking in the context of a ‘key-currency’ approach to the rise of the dollar system, here revealed as the indispensable framework for global economic development since World War II. Unlike most of his colleagues, Kindleberger was deeply interested in history, and his economics brimmed with real people and institutional details. His research at the New York Fed and BIS during the Great Depression, his wartime intelligence work, and his role in administering the Marshall Plan gave him deep insight into how the international financial system really operated. A biography of both the dollar and a man, this book is also the story of the development of ideas about how money works. It throws a revealing light on the underlying economic forces and political obstacles shaping our globalized world.

- Provides a history of international finance as a set of evolving institutions and evolving theories about how the system works

- Provides a practitioner’s eye view of central banking (1936–1942), war and reconstruction (1942–1948), contrasting with the more common top-down history

- Provides a key-currency account of the rise of the dollar system, contrasting with the more common myth of multilateralism at Bretton Woods

About the Author

Perry G. Mehrling is professor of economics at Pardee School of Global Studies at Boston University. He was professor of economics at Barnard College in New York City for 30 years. There, he taught courses on the economics of money and banking, the history of money and finance, and the financial dimensions of the U.S. retirement, health, and education systems. His most recent book is The New Lombard Street: How the Fed became the dealer of last resort (Princeton 2011). His best-known book Fischer Black and the Revolutionary Idea of Finance (Wiley 2005, 2012) has recently been released in a revised paperback edition. Currently, Prof. Mehrling directs the educational initiatives of the Institute for New Economic Thinking, one of which is his course Economics of Money and Banking, available on Coursera at www.coursera.org/course/money.

Book

Never Together

The Economic History of a Segregated America

• Author(s): Peter Temin
• ISBN: 9781316516744

• April 2022 (USA)

In November 2020, The New York Times asked fifteen of its columnists to “explain what the past four years have cost America.” Not one of the columnists focused on President Trump’s racism. This book seeks to redress this imbalance and bring Black Americans’ role in our economy to the forefront.

While all humans were created equal, economic history in the United States tells a different story. Reconstruction lasted for only a decade, and Jim Crow laws replaced it. The Civil Rights Movement lasted through the 1960s, yet decayed under President Nixon. The United States has been declining in the Social Product Index, where it now is the lowest of the G7 and 26th in the world.

For health and happiness, Temin argues that we need lasting integration efforts that allow Black Americans equal opportunity. This book convincingly integrates Black and white activities into an inclusive economic history of America.

About the Author

Peter Temin is the Elisha Gray II Professor Emeritus of Economics at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology (MIT). He received his B.A. from Swarthmore College in 1959 and his Ph.D. in Economics from MIT in 1964. Professor Temin was a Junior Fellow of the Society of Fellows at Harvard University, 1962-65; the Pitt Professor of American History and Institutions at Cambridge University, 1985-86; Head of the Economics Department at MIT, 1990-93; and President of the Economic History Association, 1995-96. Professor Temin’s most recent books are The Roman Market Economy (Princeton University Press, 2013), Prometheus Shackled: Goldsmith Banks and England’s Financial Revolution after 1700 (Oxford University Press, 2013, with Hans-Joachim Voth), The Leaderless Economy: Why the World Economic System Fell Apart and How to Fix It (Princeton University Press, 2013, with David Vines) Keynes: Useful Economics for the World Economy (MIT Press, 2014, with David Vines), and The Vanishing Middle Class: Prejudice and Power in a Dual Economy (MIT Press, 2017).

Book

How Novelty and Narratives Drive the Stock Market

Black Swans, Animal Spirits and Scapegoats

• Author(s): Nicholas Mangee
• ISBN: 9781108974899

• eBook: Oct 14, 2021

  Hardback: Dec. 16, 2021

‘Animal spirits’ is a term that describes the instincts and emotions driving human behavior in economic settings. In recent years, this concept has been discussed in relation to the emerging field of narrative economics. When unscheduled events hit the stock market, from corporate scandals and technological breakthroughs to recessions and pandemics, relationships driving returns change in unforeseeable ways. To deal with uncertainty, investors engage in narratives which simplify the complexity of real-time, non-routine change. This book assesses the novelty-narrative hypothesis for the U.S. stock market by conducting a comprehensive investigation of unscheduled events using big data textual analysis of financial news. This important contribution to the field of narrative economics finds that major macro events and associated narratives spill over into the churning stream of corporate novelty and sub-narratives, spawning different forms of unforeseeable stock market instability.

About the Author

Nicholas Mangee is an associate professor of finance in the Parker College of Business at Georgia Southern University and a research associate for the Institute for New Economic Thinking (INET) program on Knightian Uncertainty Economics (KUE). My research focuses on testing the implications of macro-finance models based on KUE by investigating the relative roles and dynamics between market fundamentals, psychology, and social context in explaining instability in stock price fluctuations. I earned my doctoral degree at the University of New Hampshire. My research has received attention from financial press outlets such as The Economist and Bloomberg News and has been featured prominently in the book Beyond Mechanical Markets: Asset Price Swings, Risk, and the Role of the State - a 2011 finalist for the Paul Samuelson Prize.

Book

Macroeconomic Inequality from Reagan to Trump

Market Power, Wage Repression, Asset Price Inflation, and Industrial Decline

• Author(s): Lance Taylor
• ISBN: 9781108796101

• Date Published: August 2020

  Availability: Available

  Format: Paperback

For five decades, rising US income and wealth inequality has been driven by wage repression and production realignments benefitting the top one percent of households. In this inaugural book for Cambridge Studies in New Economic Thinking, Professor Lance Taylor takes an innovative approach to measuring inequality, providing the first and only full integration of distributional and macro level data for the US. While work by Thomas Piketty and colleagues pursues integration from the income side, Professor Taylor uses data of distributions by size of income and wealth combined with the cost and demand sides, flows of funds, and full balance sheet accounting of real capital and financial claims. This blends measures of inequality with national income and product accounts to show the relationship between productivity and wages at the industry sector level. Taylor assesses the scope and nature of various interventions to reduce income and wealth inequalities using his simulation model, disentangling wage growth and productivity while challenging mainstream models.

About the Authors

Lance Taylor, New School for Social Research, New York Lance Taylor is the Arnhold Professor Emeritus of International Cooperation and Development and was Director of the Center for Economic Policy Analysis at the New School for Social Research, New York.

Özlem Ömer is an assistant professor at Haci Bektas Veli University in Turkey. Her research interests include growth and inequality, distributive impacts of economic policies, forces and dynamics of structural change in developed and developing countries, financial crises and information theoretic approaches to modeling political economy. Her work combines theoretical, methodological, historical, structural and policy oriented aspects of macroeconomic issues by employing modern modeling techniques in her research.

America’s Dire Inequality Demands a New Conceptual Framework. This Economist Has One
Author interview by Lynn Parramore featuring Lance Taylor

Summary of the Book: “Macroeconomic Inequality from Reagan to Trump”, by Lance Taylor