Tony Mochrie writes about how the British state really handles money. His series The Money Wars traces British economic and monetary history through a single idea: that the same state which finds hundreds of billions overnight for the financial system tells everyone else there is no money. The series runs in three parts: The Mechanism (The Ledger, The Valve), The Boundary (Debts of War, The Cork on the Sea) and The Enclosure (Don’t Tell Sid, A Nation of Tenants), with a seventh volume, Middle Powers, due in 2027.
An electrical engineer by training, he approaches economics as a system to be traced, not a creed to be defended. Each volume sets out the strongest case for the traditions it examines — the sound-money case, the Keynesian case, the case made by the men who ran the institutions — before it argues with them.
He also writes the poetry series Poetry, in the Style of…, in which famous lines about money, and then about love, are traced to their true stories and retold as new poems in the manner of well-loved poets. Money and Love are out now, and a third volume, Time, follows in 2027.
Born in London, he lives in Essex. He publishes Stock and Foil, a free Substack on British political economy.