This book treats money as what it actually is: not the cash in your hand, but a claim on the effort of other people — a record of trust, written in a ledger and enforced by law. Working from first principles, it traces the whole arc: how value first appears as surplus, how money emerges from exchange, how banks create most of the money in a modern economy at the moment they lend, why debt is the backbone rather than the disease of growth, and why credit cycles rise and fall with human nature.
Written by an accountant in a plain, observational voice, Money, Merit, and Power moves from the village marketplace to the central bank without formulas and without jargon. Each chapter teaches one idea, ends with a pattern you can watch for in the ordinary world, and weighs the established economic literature against how money and people actually behave.
It is written for the reader who wants to understand money as a system rather than as a paycheck — and who suspects, correctly, that the difference is the whole game.
Written for the reader who wants to understand money as a system rather than as a paycheck.
Idowu J. Gabriel — an accountant by profession with a master’s degree, born in southwestern Nigeria. He writes about money from the ledger’s vantage: where a balance sheet is really a question about whether a set of promises can be believed.