Graham Moore’s A Wealth of Shadows (2024) might truly be unique: the one novel of intrigue in which both heroes and villains are economists. It shows how Allied economists broke the code of Germany’s economic miracle, then created their own economic code for the Allies to defeat it. I use “code” advisedly because in each case, it was a guarded secret. Although fiction, all the characters were real people, and their actions and conflicts are accurately portrayed. Moore carefully separates fact from fiction in his author’s note.
In an interview published in my edition, Moore says he began researching the book in 2020, and the Author’s note is dated October 2023. However, the conflicts and dilemmas depicted in the book anticipate the era in which we are living in 2025. One recurring theme is the possibly inescapable necessity for idealists to compromise morally and otherwise.
I knew nothing about Germany’s MEFO, a shadow currency reminiscent of the crypto currencies advocated by the Trump administration. How they work is explained with rare clarity in dramatic scenes. Economics is hardly my strength, but here’s my understanding.
Ordinary Germans used reichsmarks to purchase MEFO, which they parked in savings accounts earning 4%. The government exploited the accumulation of MEFO, against which they borrowed reichsmarks, in order to buy war supplies. A difference between MEFO and crypto is that account holders were not supposed to use MEFO for purchases. But Moore’s characters project that ultimately the people would eventually have demanded to withdraw it from their savings accounts in order to buy things, which would have led directly to the economy’s collapse or a repeat of the catastrophic inflation that the Nazis had tamed in the 1930s. In a compelling narrative, the novel shows how US and UK economists proceeded to beat Germany at its own game. I had no idea that the International Monetary Fund and World Bank grew out of such a strategy.
Each of the book’s sixty-nine chapters begins with a quotation. Some strike me as so profound, relevant to our time or otherwise interesting that they make up the rest of this post. I am not violating Moore’s copyright, since the quotations are not his words and each one is brief. However, I am conscious that Moore did the work and I am merely a transcriber. I hope that, aside from their inherent value, they might encourage subscribers to this website to pick up his remarkable book.
Note: The number beginning each quotation refers to the book’s chapter number.
1. “It might make sense just to get some [bitcoin] in case it catches on. If enough people think the same way, that becomes a self-fulfilling prophecy.”
—Satoshi Nakamoto, the pseudonymous inventor of bitcoin
5. “All money is a matter of belief.”
—Adam Smith
6. “From the saintly and single-minded idealist to the fanatic is often but a step.”
—Friedrich August von Hayek
8. “When goods do not cross borders, soldiers will.”
—Frédéric Bastiat, nineteenth-century French economist
16. “Capitalism is the extraordinary belief that the nastiest of men, for the nastiest of reasons, will somehow work for the benefit of us all.”
—John Maynard Keynes
19. “A man generally has two reasons for doing a thing. One that sounds good, and a real one.”
—J. P. Morgan
22. “Most economic fallacies derive from the tendency to assume that there is a fixed pie, that one party can gain only at the expense of another.”
—Milton Friedman
23. “When the law and morality contradict each other, the citizen has the cruel alternative of either losing his moral sense or losing his respect for the law.”
—Frédéric Bastiat
24. “No one would remember the Good Samaritan if he’d only had good intentions; he had money as well.”
—Margaret Thatcher
25. “The best things in life are free. The second best are very, very expensive.”
—Coco Chanel
28. “In a conflict, the middle ground is least likely to be correct.”
—Nassim Nicholas Taleb
30. “Money is…the apogee of human tolerance…. Thanks to money, even people who don’t know each other and don’t trust each other can nevertheless cooperate effectively.”
—Yuval Noah Harari
31. “Hollywood is a place where they’ll pay you a thousand dollars for a kiss and fifty cents for your soul.”
—Marilyn Monroe
33. “The whole financial history of the world is about moving from currencies of distrust to currencies of trust. If you look at grain, which was the original currency in ancient Mesopotamia, it required very little trust. You can eat it. You don’t need to trust anybody that it’s valuable. As you move to gold and paper and digital currency, there is more and more trust. Blockchain is an attempt to go back…. As a historian, I’m skeptical.”
—Yuval Noah Harari
34. “He who is unfit to serve his fellow citizens wants to rule them.”
—Ludwig von Mises
35. “The first thing a man will do for his ideals is lie.”
—Joseph A. Schumpeter, twentieth-century Austrian-American economist
38. “The only antidote to dangerous ideas is strong alternatives vigorously advocated.”
—Larry Summers
39. “If economists wished to study the horse, they wouldn’t go and look at horses. They would sit in their studies and say to themselves, ‘What would I do if I were a horse?’ ”
—Ronald Coase, Nobel Prize–winning British economist
41. “MMT [Modern Monetary Theory] says that the government’s deficit is always someone else’s surplus.”
—Stephanie Kelton, twenty-first-century American economist
42. “The only good reason to have money is this: So that you can tell any SOB in the world to go to hell.”
—Humphrey Bogart
47. “Money isn’t a material reality—it is a psychological construct…. Trust is the raw material from which all types of money are minted.”
—Yuval Noah Harari
48. “Man is an animal that makes bargains: No other animal does this—no dog exchanges bones with another.”
—Adam Smith
49. “Remember that credit is money.”
—Benjamin Franklin
56. “When I was young, I thought money was the most important thing in life. Now that I am old, I know that it is.”
—Oscar Wilde
61. “So you think that money is the root of all evil. Have you ever asked what is the root of all money?”
—Ayn Rand
64. “Finance is the art of passing money from hand to hand until it finally disappears.”
—Robert Sarnoff, chairman of RCA
68. “Virtue is more to be feared than vice, because its excesses are not subject to the regulation of conscience.”
—Adam Smith
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