The other day I was asking for comments on Adam Tooze’s book  “Wages of Destruction”. Now our good friend “Lorenzo from Oz” has answered my call. It turns out that he already back in 2009 wrote a review on the book on his excellent blog Thinking Out Aloud.

Here is Lorenzo’s wrap-up:

“Tooze’s book is genuinely revelatory. The purposiveness of Nazi policy, the fears and aspirations that drove it, the limitations it laboured under are all made clear. Hitler was, from first to last, a wilful gambler who knew himself to be such. He was also a consummate political game player who attracted and used people of genuine talent for a purpose that was horrific. That the Nazi economy was a loot economy was not happenstance but the nature of the beast. Genghis Khan with a telephone indeed.”

So far every single review of this book I have read has been positive – I am still hoping to find some time to read it – until then I highly recommend that you all have a look at Lorenzo’s review of the book.

PS I continue to think that we can learn a lot about the present crisis by studying history. Yesterday I spend some time in the company the Danish central bank governor Niels Bernstein and Polish central bank governor Marek Belka. Dr. Belka brought up the year of 1931. Dr. Belka of course spend time at the University of Chicago in 1980s so he full well understand monetary policy and monetary history. I hope that Dr. Belka will educate his European colleagues about monetary history (he yesterday also referenced Friedman’s and Schwartz’s “Monetary History”). See what I earlier have written on the “Tagic year 1931”.