Mehrling highlights Kindleberger’s belief that the world is an "optimal currency area" where trade works best under a single currency—the U.S. dollar—rather than through international agreements or flexible exchange rates.
The central narrative explores how the global economy transitioned from the British pound sterling system to the American dollar-led system.
Kindleberger argued that for a global economy to remain stable, there must be a single "stabilizer" or leader that maintains open markets for goods and provides counter-cyclical lending as a lender of last resort. Money and Empire: Charles P. Kindleberger and t...
According to reviewers at Cambridge University Press , the book captures three distinct phases of Kindleberger's career:
In , Perry Mehrling provides an intellectual biography that doubles as a "biography of the dollar". The book traces the life and career of Charles P. Kindleberger (1910–2003), a former MIT economist and policymaker whose work defined the architecture of the modern international monetary system . Core Themes and Key Arguments Kindleberger argued that for a global economy to
His tenure at MIT, where he wrote the standard textbook on international economics and fought intellectual battles against both Monetarists and Keynesians.
Kindleberger viewed the U.S. role not as one of exploitation but of necessary leadership to provide "international public goods," such as global financial stability and crisis management. Kindleberger’s Three "Lives" and his self-identified masterwork
His retirement years, during which he wrote his best-known work, Manias, Panics, and Crashes , and his self-identified masterwork, A Financial History of Western Europe .