Reading List and Sources

This is the works the argument on this site rests on, listed so a reader can go from any claim to the primary document behind it. Nothing here is asked to be taken on trust. Every book, paper, and dataset below is either freely readable online or published by the institution that produced the number.

How to read this list

Three habits shape the selection.

Primary sources first. Where a central bank, a statistical agency, or the original author has published the material directly, that is the link given. A working paper from the Bank for International Settlements beats a newspaper summary of it. The Bank of England describing how money is created beats a critic describing the Bank of England.

Pre 1971 economists carry weight. Writers who worked while the gold standard was still a live system, Mises, Fisher, Cantillon, saw monetary questions that the pure fiat era later trained itself to overlook. They are read here on their own terms, not filtered through later textbooks.

Every institutional source is public. FRED, the BLS, the BIS, the ECB, the World Gold Council and the rest all publish their series openly. Anyone can pull the same numbers this site charts. No figure on the site comes from a private feed.

The full inline citation for any specific claim lives in the individual knowledge base article that makes it. This page is the map of the territory, not the footnote apparatus. When an article cites the Bank of England 2014 bulletin for a proportion, the exact page reference is in that article; here you get the work itself and why it matters.

How money is actually created

The two works below settle, from opposite directions, the most basic question in monetary economics: where does money come from. One is the central bank of the United Kingdom writing in its own bulletin. The other is a controlled experiment with a real loan from a real bank. They agree.

McLeay, M., Radia, A. and Thomas, R. (2014), “Money creation in the modern economy”, Bank of England Quarterly Bulletin 2014 Q1. The Bank of England, in its own publication, states that commercial banks create money when they lend, that they do not lend out savers’ deposits, and that the money multiplier taught in textbooks is not how the system works. This is the canonical reference for the mechanism. Read it
Werner, R. A. (2014), “Can banks individually create money out of nothing? The theories and the empirical evidence”, International Review of Financial Analysis, 36. The first empirical test of the question, run by borrowing 200,000 euros from a cooperative bank in Bavaria while watching its internal accounting. The money was typed into existence with no prior deposit and no prior reserve. The textbook is falsified by direct observation. Read it
Werner, R. A. (2016), “A lost century in economics: Three theories of banking and the conclusive evidence”, International Review of Financial Analysis, 46. Traces how the correct theory of banking, dominant until the 1930s, was driven out of the textbooks in the postwar decades and reinstated after 2014. The companion piece that explains why the 2014 result surprised anyone. Read it

Hyperinflation, the historical record

When money creation runs to its conclusion, the currency dies. These three works document what that looks like, once as a reference table of every recorded case and twice as an eyewitness history of the largest well documented episode.

Hanke, S. H. and Krus, N. (2012), World Inflation and Hyperinflation Table, Cato Institute. The definitive catalogue of hyperinflation episodes, each with a clean start date, end date, peak month, peak monthly rate, and the currency that failed. The reference the site uses whenever it names a hyperinflation. View the table
Fergusson, A. (1975), When Money Dies. The narrative history of the German inflation of 1921 to 1923, built from diaries, letters, and press of the time. Reads as what a currency collapse does to ordinary households, savings, wages, trust, rather than as a chart. Read it
Bresciani-Turroni, C. (1937), The Economics of Inflation. The rigorous economic study of the same German episode, dense with data and statistics, by an economist who observed it at close range. The analytic counterpart to Fergusson’s narrative. Read it

The pre 1971 economists this project weights

These writers worked before or during the transition away from gold. Their diagnosis of paper money, credit expansion, and the point at which new money enters the economy predates and predicts the post 1971 record.

Cantillon, R. (written ca. 1730), Essai sur la Nature du Commerce en Général, Higgs translation. The original analysis of what is now called the Cantillon effect: new money does not raise all prices at once, it enters at a point and enriches whoever is near that point first. The root of the site’s argument about who gains from monetary expansion. Read it
Fisher, I. (1911), The Purchasing Power of Money. The classic statement of the equation of exchange, MV = PQ, and the framework for treating the price level as a monetary quantity. Fisher is the bridge from the classical quantity theory to modern monetary analysis. Read it
Mises, L. von (1912), The Theory of Money and Credit. The foundational Austrian treatment of money, credit expansion, and the business cycle. Argues that credit created without prior saving distorts the structure of production and ends in a bust. Read it
Hazlitt, H. (1946), Economics in One Lesson. The plain language primer on seeing the unseen consequences of economic policy, including inflation as a hidden transfer rather than a natural force. The recommended first book for a reader new to the subject. Read it
Rueff, J. (1972), The Monetary Sin of the West. The French economist who advised de Gaulle, on how the dollar based Bretton Woods system let the United States run deficits without settling them, and why that arrangement was bound to break. Written by a participant, at the moment it broke. Read it
Rothbard, M. N. (1963), What Has Government Done to Our Money? The short, direct account of how money originates in the market and how successive government interventions, from coin debasement to central banking to pure fiat, degrade it. The 119 page introduction to the whole thesis. Read it
Hayek, F. A. (1976), Denationalisation of Money. The argument that the state monopoly on money is the reason inflation recurs, and that competing private currencies would discipline it. Included because it frames the monopoly, not because the site endorses the remedy. Read it

Modern analysts

Contemporary writers who assemble the long run monetary record for a general reader.

Ammous, S. (2018), The Bitcoin Standard. Traces the history of monetary technologies by the property of hardness, why gold held its role for millennia, why fiat currencies lose theirs, and where a fixed supply money fits. Useful for its history of money whatever the reader concludes about Bitcoin. Publisher page
Alden, L. (2023), Broken Money. A systematic account of the monetary system from shells to central banks, organised around the speed of transactions versus the speed of settlement. Strong on why the post 1971 system behaves as it does. Author page
Hanke, S. H. Beyond the hyperinflation table above, Hanke maintains ongoing measured estimates of inflation in currencies where official figures are unreliable, using purchasing power parity and high frequency exchange rate data. The standard independent source when a government’s own number is in doubt. Cato profile

Primary data institutions

Every time series the site charts is pulled from one of these public sources. Links go to the top of each catalogue; the individual article names the exact series.

FRED, Federal Reserve Bank of St Louis. The single largest public economic database: M2 money supply, CPI, the Federal Reserve balance sheet, the federal funds rate, equity indices, house prices, federal debt. Most series on the site trace here. fred.stlouisfed.org
BLS, US Bureau of Labor Statistics. The Consumer Price Index, productivity, and real earnings for the United States, with the methodology notes that matter for reading the CPI. bls.gov
US Census Bureau. Population, households, income distribution, and housing statistics used to normalise monetary series per person and per household. census.gov
Federal Reserve Board. Reserve requirement history, the H.4.1 balance sheet release, and monetary policy statements, at the source. federalreserve.gov
Bank of England, A Millennium of Macroeconomic Data. UK prices, wages, interest rates, and money going back to 1209. The dataset that makes the century before 1913 visible next to the century after. bankofengland.co.uk
BIS, Bank for International Settlements. Cross border credit, debt statistics, property price series, and the working papers, notably Borio and Disyatat, that formalise the credit view of the monetary system. bis.org
ECB, European Central Bank. The euro area money supply, HICP inflation, and policy rates, through the ECB Data Portal. ecb.europa.eu
Eurostat. Harmonised prices, national accounts, and household statistics across the European Union member states. ec.europa.eu/eurostat
Deutsche Bundesbank. German monetary and price data, and the April 2017 Monthly Report that, like the Bank of England, states plainly that bank lending is not constrained by existing central bank balances. bundesbank.de
IMF, International Monetary Fund. International Financial Statistics and the World Economic Outlook database for cross country inflation, money, and reserves. imf.org/en/Data
World Gold Council. Historical gold price series and central bank gold reserve holdings, used whenever the site prices anything in a fixed weight of gold. gold.org
LBMA, London Bullion Market Association. The London gold and silver benchmark prices, the reference fixings behind the gold series. lbma.org.uk
CMS, Centers for Medicare and Medicaid Services. National Health Expenditure data, the source for the long run rise in US medical prices set against general CPI. cms.gov
NCES, National Center for Education Statistics. Tuition and college cost series, the source for education prices set against general CPI. nces.ed.gov

Two long run compilations sit behind the historical charts and deserve naming: the Maddison Project Database for output and population back to the year 1, and MeasuringWorth for consistent long run price, wage, and purchasing power series. Both are academic, open, and cited where the site reaches before the modern statistical agencies begin.