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Money, Sound and Unsound

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Money, Sound and Unsound

Money, Sound and Unsound is Joseph T. Salerno’s 2010 Mises Institute essay collection on Austrian monetary theory, sound money, inflation, deflation, depression, the gold standard, and monetary history.

Collection Scope

The volume collects 26 essays written for different audiences over roughly three decades. Salerno’s introduction frames the common theme as sound money in the Misesian sense: market-chosen money whose purchasing power is not subject to government or central-bank manipulation.

The book is therefore not a single treatise, but it works as a single-volume map of Salerno’s monetary economics. It moves from technical foundations to policy controversy, historical application, and short commentary on central banking and gold.

Four Core Parts Plus Commentary

Part One, “Foundations of Monetary Theory,” contains six chapters: John Law and Turgot as two traditions in monetary theory, Mises’s monetary theory, The ‘True’ Money Supply, a theory of money prices, international monetary theory, and a comment on Yeager.

Part Two, “Inflation, Deflation and Depression,” covers Austrian macroeconomic coordination, Mises on inflation and expectations, war finance, an Austrian taxonomy of deflation, and a response to Gordon Tullock’s critique of Austrian depression theory. Part Three treats the gold standard, including the 100 percent gold proposal, true versus false gold standards, recent gold-standard proposals, and the international gold standard.

Part Four applies the theory to monetary history and policy: the 1920s and 1930s, Timberlake on inflation and money, the October 1987 stock-market crash, sound money in ex-communist Europe, and currency boards. Part Five is commentary on Greenspan, gold in the Great Depression, currency competition, and the deflation-depression link.

Foundational Papers Inside

The collection reprints the 1987 TMS paper as Chapter 3, making the volume the easiest single place to see Salerno’s aggregate in its broader theoretical setting. It also brings forward the dehomogenization argument, especially through the discussion of Misesian monetary theory and the divergence between calculation-centered and knowledge-centered Austrian paradigms.

That matters for Joseph T. Salerno as an author node. His monetary work is not only a narrow measurement project. It is a Mises-Rothbard sound-money program spanning the definition of money, central-bank inflation, business-cycle diagnosis, gold-standard reconstruction, and post-communist reform.

Role in Salerno’s Work

The volume is the Salerno monetary corpus in one place. Monetary Aggregates and Credit Expansion uses the TMS paper for measurement. Credit Expansion Dynamics uses Mises and Rothbard for the mechanism. This collection shows how Salerno holds those pieces together under the sound-money heading.

The article’s confidence is high because the raw source preserves the table of contents, introduction, and full text cleanly. Interpretive weight should still be separated: the book documents Salerno’s Austrian program; it does not make every disputed claim in that program uncontested.

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