The Power of Gold begins with the magical, religious, and artistic qualities of gold. As the story progresses from primitive uses to the invention of coinage and the transformation of gold into money and the gold standard, gold speaks more loudly of power as it acquires increasing importance as money. Ultimately, the book confronts the future of gold, in a world where gold has been relegated to the periphery of global finance.

Along the way, we meet Moses and Midas, Croesus and Crassus, Byzantine emperors and humble miners, unscrupulous moneyers and ransomed kings, Francisco Pizarro and Benvenuto Cellini, Charlemagne and Charles de Gaulle, Richard I and Richard Nixon, Asian monarchs and Arab potentates, Issac Newton and Winston Churchill, David Ricardo, and John Maynard Keynes, the Forty-Niners and speculators who pushed gold to $850 an ounce in 1980.

Whether it's Egyptian pharaohs with depraved tastes, the luxury-mad survivors of the Black Death, the Chinese inventor of paper money, the pirates on the Spanish Main, or the hard-nosed believers in the international gold standard -- men like the inscrutable Montagu Norman of the Bank of England or President Herbert Hoover of the United States -- gold has been the supreme possession. It has been an icon for greed and an emblem of rectitude, as well as a vehicle for vanityand a badge of power that has shaped the destiny of humanity through the ages.

In the end, this story is a morality tale. The pursuit of eternity will not be satisfied by gold, or by anything else we choose to replace gold. Gold as an end in itself is meaningless. Hoarding does not create wealth. Gold makes sense only as a means to an end: to beautify, to adorn, to exchange for what we want and need.