THE MONEY PLOT

The author trades the brisk, shoe-leather reporting of Bet the Farm for a dense, scholarly history of cash and its metaphorical significance. He posits that money is an allegorical “fiction” in which every element “corresponds to something other than itself and it is up to the reader to break the code and translate the meaning.” Drawing on disciplines such as narrative theory and cross-cultural anthropology, Kaufmann analyzes the messages latent in money or its stand-ins, which range from the ostrich-egg-shell beads of Neolithic Kenyans to bitcoin. “Currencies” have included slain warriors’ wives, who often became concubines of their husbands’ killers in ancient Greece, and Native American wampum, which served as a “historical record of treaties and transfers of property.” Tracing the impact of the rise of financial markets, Kaufman links events and ideas as disparate as Richard Nixon’s decision to untether the dollar from gold and Claude Lévi-Strauss’ concept of the “floating signifier.” The author is skeptical of newer, near-inscrutable tools like the Chicago Board of Exchange’s volatility index, or “the Fear Index.” If we can’t decrypt such innovations, we risk “becoming pawns and shells ourselves, other people’s money.” Kaufman’s prose is often turgid—one example: “The acolytes of Bachelier, Bhattacharya, Black, Scholes, and Natterberg live in a world only they can perceive; a world where a Delta hedge is simply one of a multitude of back spreads, front spreads, diagonals, Christmas trees, butterflies, condors, strangles and other baroque trading strategies”—but the book may interest readers with tastes broad enough to encompass ancient Greek philosophy, The Golden Bough, corporate strategy, A Random Walk Down Wall Street, cryptocurrency, and detailed discussions of literary theory and its relation to monetary policy or investment strategy. Others may wonder if its ideas, complex as they are, couldn’t have been more effectively presented in a long-form magazine article.

An erudite but sluggish overview of the role of money throughout history.