We are delighted to announce that the 13th Erasmus Seminar will be given by Dr Duncan Needham, at 6pm on Wednesday 14th October.
Duncan will give a 40-minute talk, following which there will be a Q/A session.
Duncan will be a guest at Formal Hall following the Seminar: members of Darwin are welcome to book themselves in for dinner.
Please note that in the event that numbers are high, an overflow hall will be used for video coverage once all seats are taken in the Bradfield Room. We advise arriving early.
Abstract
What is money? As the Cambridge anthropologist Alison Quiggin wrote, ‘Everyone, except an economist, knows what ‘money’ means, and even an economist can describe it in the course of a chapter or so’. But do we really know what money is? This paper will discuss theories and historical forms of money to draw parallels between how we use money today and the system of social credit developed by the ancient Babylonians. There have been several diversions along the way, notably the gold standard that defined money as the value of the precious metal in the coinage. We shall also look at the monetarist diversion of the 1970s and 1980s when governments across the world tried, and mostly failed, to control their money supplies in their efforts to reduce price inflation. The political and economic consequences of those battles remain with us today. We finish with a brief look at crypto-assets which, despite the claims sometimes made, are manifestly not money.
Biography
Duncan Needham is Dean and Senior Tutor of Darwin College, and Director of the Centre for Financial History. He teaches postgraduate courses in economic history, with a particular focus on the institutions that have supported economic growth since the nineteenth century: the gold standard, the International Monetary Fund, and the Euro. His first book was UK monetary policy from devaluation to Thatcher, 1967-82 and he has since published on the evolution of British banking since the 1970s, the growth of public debt in Western Europe, and the failed attempt to build an airport in the Thames Estuary. Before returning to academia, Duncan was a bond trader at JP Morgan and then a fund manager at Cairn Capital.
Please register here
