The guiding assumption of The Cash Nexus is that these conflicting impulses --- call them, for the sake of simplicity, sex, violence and power --- are individually or together capable of over-riding money, the economic motive. … Economists know this, but naturally shy away from it. Often they use the generic term “shock” to describe events that are “exogenous” to their carefully constructed models. Yet the notion that a war is comparable with a meteorological disaster is hardly satisfactory to the historian, who has the daunting task of trying to explain shocks as well as market equilibria. (p. 12)
This book’s central conclusion is that money does not make the world go round … Rather, it has been political events --- above all, wars --- that have shaped the institutions of modern economic life: tax-collecting bureaucracies, central banks, bond markets, stock exchanges. (p. 13)