American Default: The Untold Story of FDR, the Supreme Court, and the Battle Over Gold Unavailable

The notion that America, like the Lannisters from Game of Thrones, always pays its debts is subject to several caveats. In American Default, Edwards describes the most controversial and complex example of a possible U.S. federal government default, the demonetization of gold, the devaluation of the dollar, and the abrogation of the gold clause in bonds issued both governmentally and privately during the New Deal. His methodology entails old-school narrative history of economic thought and economic history, with much attention to descriptive statistics and to who said or did what and when. Although Edwards mentions regression results, he does not present any. Edwards clearly took pains to write an engaging narrative for a general audience, even supplying a lengthy timeline and dramatis personae in the front matter. During the book’s “long gestation,” he also interviewed monetary history luminaries Milton Friedman, Anna Schwartz, Allan Meltzer, and Michael Bordo, among...