‘The Federalist Papers for a Gold Standard’ Is First Book Issued by The New York Sun
This article is from the archive of The New York Sun before the launch of its new website in 2022. The Sun has neither altered nor updated such articles but will seek to correct any errors, mis-categorizations or other problems introduced during transfer.
NEW YORK — “This brilliant book is The Federalist Papers for a gold standard,” says Steve Forbes of the first anthology of editorials of The New York Sun. “It succinctly, dazzlingly — and convincingly — makes the irrefutable case for re-linking the battered dollar to gold.”
The book — “It Shines for All: The Gold Standard Editorials of The New York Sun” — is edited by famed author David Pietrusza and contains a foreward by one of America’s most distinguished writers on markets and money, James Grant, editor of Grant’s Interest Rate Observer.
“It Shines for All” is being published this month by a new colophon, New York Sun Books, and is available in paperback and Kindle editions, The New York Sun announced. It contains 48 editorials issued by the Sun during the first decade of the 21st century, during which the value of the dollar has collapsed to less than a 1,500th of an ounce of gold.
The book itself is priced in United States fiat currency at $14.95 for the paperback edition and $7.99 for the Kindle edition and is available, among other places, on Amazon.com. A former director of the Office of Management and Budget, David Stockman, calls its essays “classics of the editorial writing genre — just in time for the reckoning over the dollar.”
The book contains one of the most talked-about editorials ever issued by the Sun, “The Fiat Kilogram,” which reacted to the discovery that the official kilogram has been losing mass. The discovery was made even though the kilogram, a cylinder of platinum and irridum, has for more than 100 years been locked under three glass domes at the International Bureau of Weights and Measures.
The New York Times commented on the news with an editorial that said the fact that the kilogram was losing mass, albeit only a tiny amount, defeats its whole purpose, “constancy.” The Sun, however, reacted by observing, “Of course, we could let the confounded kilogram just float,” the way we let the dollar float.
Another editorial in the book is “Sarah Palin’s Seoul,” which came out after the failure of the Group of Twenty Summit at Seoul, South Korea, where President Obama’s demarche on international monetary affairs irked his fellow leaders of the major economies. The editorial sketched how the problems Mr. Obama encountered would have fallen away had he pursued the policies recommended by the former governor of Alaska.
Yet another editorial in the anthology asked the question, “Has America Already Defaulted?” It was issued after an aide of Mr. Obama used the world “insanity” to describe a move in the congress to block the raising of the debt ceiling. The editorial quoted the work of two economists, Kenneth Rogoff and Carmen Reinhart, who wrote a famous paper on the history of defaults in which they noted that America counts as a sovereign default virgin only by excluding “events such as the lowering of the gold content of the currency in 1933, or the suspension of convertibility in the nineteenth-century civil war.”
New York may be the financial capital of the world, James Grant writes in the foreward to “It Shines for All,” “but the crusade for the restoration of sound money is the Sun’s scoop.” He called its campaign the first in New York since the “Peerless Henry Hazlitt was ousted by the New York Times some 65 years ago for his poposition to the Keynes-inspired Bretton Woods agreements.”
