Books like Getting it Wrong

I re-read the first six books of Frank Herbert’s Dune series this year. I only last read them forty years ago as a teenager. I remember much from the movies and the various mini-series, but had forgotten how these six books are epic masterpieces in and of themselves. They present a much richer and more detailed universe than I ever remembered, or was able to absorb back in my teen years. Herbert’s epic is a philosophical treatise on the nature of political power and a speculative treatise on the nature of humanity’s future. (The first six books are: Dune (1965), Dune Messiah (1969), Children of Dune (1976), God Emperor of Dune (1981), Heretics of Dune (1984) and Chapterhouse: Dune (1985))

Lombard Street is the classic statement of how central banks began functioning to insure the private bank system against bank panics. Walter Bagehot wrote this at the time of a revolution in banking that came about after the Joint Stock Companies Act of 1862 allowed private banks to have limited liability. Banking then boomed in England, and the Bank of England went from being a private bank to a bank also serving the Crown of England, and finally into a central bank as we see them today. 

The Bank of England would hold reserves for the entire private banking system should they need them in times of bank panic, which were periodic in those days (and still today). At the same time, the Bank provided the money supply through note issue. This created a money and banking authority that was efficient in its practice of stabilizing the money and financial… show more.