Over the last weekend I finished reading Popes and Bankers: A Cultural History of Credit and Debt, from Aristotle to AIG by Jack Cashill and enjoyed it a great deal. It’s not a perfect book, but it has a lot going for it: the amount of information contained in it is simply amazing for a relatively thin, easy-to-read paperback and it is written from an ethical perspective that I believe most members of this list will find agreeable. I certainly could disagree with very little of the moral and ethical commentary contained therein.
The book is really a collection of loosely tied essays and historical notes on the origins and use of credit and money. Surprisingly, more than anything is is also a kind of a history of Jewish people in Europe and, to a lesser degree, in the US. It is also a cautionary tale about “prodigals” turning on the “usurers” through history demonstrating that little is new under the sun in the financial area other than the technical innovations. The specific distinct areas of the book are too numerous to mention, but even after having a lifelong interest in the origins of money and credit I learned a great deal about the contributions of the Greeks and Romans, the Medicis, Luther and Calvin, as well as Marx and Aristotle and the almost endless parade of German and American Jews. For those who have read more than one description of the various early European manias and the creation of the Fed, those in the book can be safely skipped, but it was worth it for me to pick up some details I wasn’t aware of before.
On the negative side, while interesting there were too many citations from Michael Lewis with respect to the modern American portion of the material. These made for a somewhat amateurish quality of those chapters, and of course reminded me of our host’s lack of respect for the man. Overall though it was a very satisfying book so I highly recommend it.
