The 1970s Redux

What happened to the oil billions? - at MoneyWeek.com - the best of the international financial media

Few will remember Adam Smith's book Paper Money'. This Smith is not the 18th-century economist, but the financial columnist George Goodman, who wrote under that pseudonym and is mainly remembered today as the author of the classic book The Money Game'. The great value in older books is that they give you perspective about what people were thinking at a certain point in time, which is made all the more interesting since you know what happened afterward.

Paper Money' was published in 1981, and Smith worries a lot about inflation and the whole global oil and banking complex. Surely, these were big topics weighing on the minds of most investors at the time. This particular book is not remembered much today, because its worries were so spectacularly mistimed. Shortly after the book was published, the price of oil began its collapse and inflation slowed dramatically.

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