دانلود کتاب قدرت چسبنده شبکه های مالی جهانی در اقتصاد جهانی

In 1922 William T. Foster published a paper in the American Economic Review on the circuit flow of money. He wanted to draw attention to the nature of these flows and their potential significance to understanding business fluctuations. He defined money as currency and checking deposits moving in the opposite direction to the flow of goods. In contrast to goods, which disappear from circulation when a good is consumed or disposed of (environmental and energy considerations notwithstanding), money keeps circulating endlessly. Hence the notion of the circuit flow, which Foster illustrated with a diagram made of reservoirs and pipelines. By Foster’s own admission the drawing was influenced by Malcolm C. Rorty, who studied engineering at Cornell University, cofounded the National Bureau of Economic Research, and was the president of the American Statistical Association. Data to quantify financial flows were starting to become available in the USA, and with his paper Foster was clearly encouraging his fellow economists and statisticians to use such data, and his engineering-inspired circuit model, to better understand money. The most important application for him was to study the effects of the circuit flow on the business cycle, as well as multiple potential factors that can slow down the flow, from lower wages, to higher taxes and lower expected inflation (or expected deflation), to higher rate of savings and retained earnings. The paper was part of the book co-authored by Foster with his Harvard classmate Waddill Catchings, which was published in 1923 under the simplest possible title, “Money.” Catchings at that time was making a fortune on Wall Street, becoming the first senior partner at Goldman Sachs from outside of the Goldman or Sachs families. His financial engineering nearly bankrupted Goldman Sachs through the creation of a highly leveraged investment trust called Goldman Sachs Trading Corporation, which pooled investors’ money to invest in stock, and unraveled in the wake of the 1929 great crash, to which it in fact directly contributed. Also in 1929, on the banks of the river Euphrates in erstwhile Mesopotamia (today’s southern Iraq), German archaeologist Julius Jordan unearthed a vast cache of clay tablets from Uruk, one of the world’s first large cities. The tablets, written in an abstract script known as cuneiform, are the oldest form of writing yet discovered, dating from around 3100 BCE. It was not until the 1970s that the French archaeologist Denise Schmandt-Besserat began to figure out what the tablets were for. As it turns out, they were not poetry, but rather records of transactions and obligations; records of what has been paid and what is owed and should be paid in the future. As such, these tablets simultaneously represent the world’s first known accounts and legal contracts. The practice of accounting for transactions, payments and claims, also involved the first known use of abstract symbols for numbers, including stunningly large figures. One demand for war reparations, for example, was for 4.5 trillion liters of barley grain, more than fifteen times the global annual production of barley today. As such, the clay tablets from Uruk represent a financial, accounting, and legal innovation all in one, which also brought with it a breakthrough in writing and counting. These innovations were developed, in the words of Tim Hartford “to deal with a web of obligations and long-range plans between people who did not know each other well, who might perhaps never even meet” (2017). The same problem has faced society ever since, in ever more complex forms.