You have to hand it to a man who quits his cushy City job managing money to write a clean, underbrush-hacking book on the fallacy of paper currencies. He's serious, he's fearless, and he learned from experience.
His wakeup call to sound-money economics came in the wake of the LTCM crisis. The lessons from that are the same as the lessons from 2008... or the coming euro explosion... or another round of bank collapse. Detlev gets it; the rest of his ilk in the banking community and the wider parasitic political party of central banks are too busy saving their skins to care!
I believe Detlev Schlichter's Paper Money Collapse will prove the handbook for a new generation of economists. He's a bit like the Euclid of sound money. Once the Von Mises crowd gets a hold of this book, it can't fail to go viral in all sorts of excerpts! Your best bet is to read it cover to cover. It starts out from one basic principle: YOU are the driver of the economy. You buy what you need when you need or want it.
Detlev handily rejects, with welcome soundness, the idea that the economy is a super-organism worthy of preservation by the unsound manipulations of the State! All this intervention results in is what Detlev refers to as "dislocations." That is, misallocations of capital galore. I've just turned 29... I consider myself a young woman who's grown up in a world of nothing but false interest rates -- that give false clues to savers and industry -- that deliver only boom-bust cycles in rapid succession. I was born in a recession, I got my first job in a boom, I was baptized a finance editor by the bust, and I expect to enjoy myself even as the greatest depression the world has ever seen creeps stealthily to catastrophic proportions. Detlev is my hero.
We're not victims if we know what's going on. We might not take Washington D.C., London, or Geneva by storm, but we can take Detlev's concise lessons and teach them to those we care for! If the central bankers want to protect their own hides, so do we! Let's buy gold (and silver too) and sleep at night.
Ultimately, Detlev may come across as something of a pessimist. He's earnest, yet, he knows people. He gets power. So instead of painting a utopia backed by gold, his epilogue offers glimpse of chaos and collapse, and plenty more economic defibrillations -- thanks to government's can-kickers who just want to push the consequences down the road a week... a month... a year.
Right now, my dad's retiring, and he's outraged at being punished by his government (for whom he gathered revenues for 35-plus years) for saving in good faith. This is a great book to give him! He'll know he's far from alone for feeling as he does.
In short: Detlev delivers! His facts are simple. No GDP (Gross Deception Presentation) charts here. Just basic reasoning with algebraic clarity applied to man's needs. If you don't have the fortitude for Von Mises or Rothbard just yet, start here.