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This book explains how the American monetary system has developed since the turn of the century. An outgrowth of many years of teaching money and banking to undergraduate liberal arts students, it seeks to enhance the relevance and appeal of the subject by placing it in a larger framework of economic issues and developments than is typically done in money and banking textbooks. I have tried to achieve this by showing how the monetary system is integrated with recent history and how it has evolved.

The book is addressed primarily to two groups of readers. One group consists chiefly of undergraduate money and banking students who would read it as a supplement to their basic textbooks. In writing I have had my students over many years at the University of the South very much in mind. Because the approach taken is not narrowly focused but quite wide-ranging, the book may be deemed appropriate for other courses also, such as U.S. economic history, finance, and political science courses that deal with public policy. A second group of potential readers consists of persons who have some interest in and familiarity with economics in general and monetary police in particular as a result perhaps of having taken one or more courses at an earlier time or by virtue of their careers. The subject is fascinating to me and I hope that some of the fascination has entered the pages that follow.

Robert A. Degen

Robert A. Degen is Professor of Economics, Emeritus at Sewanee, The University of the South, where he taught money and banking, history of economic thought, and comparative economic systems, and was chairman of the Department of Economics for ten years.

He holds the B.S. and M.A. degrees from Syracuse University and the Ph.D. from the university of Wisconsin. Prior to his career as an academic economist, the author spent five years in commercial bank in New Jersey.

During World War II he served as a statistical control officer with the U.S. Army Air Forces in North Africa. Most recently, he is the author of The American Monetary System.