The delirium of milliards

The Financial Times columnist Samuel Brittan wrote recently about the current obsession with reviving old economists' work to look for contemporary lessons.

He questioned how much could be learned from the likes of Karl Marx and others, whose work was trotted out as some kind of explanation for the near-collapse of the financial system in the light of Lehmans in September 2008. Another writer Brittan might have put into this category is Adam Fergusson, author of When Money Dies, subtitled The Nightmare of the Weimar Hyper-Inflation. Fergusson’s book, originally published in 1975, was recently reprinted and has become a favourite of a number of economists and fund managers, notably those in the fixed interest part of the markets. Fergusso...