'Carl-Ludwig Holtfrerich has provided a remarkable biography of both an economist and a currency. The deutschmark is rightly remembered for providing post-World War II Germany with rock-solid economic and financial stability. Edward Tenenbaum, its architect, is rather less well remembered. Holtfrerich, in this remarkable book featuring cameo appearances by everyone from US General Omar Bradley to German Chancellor Ludwig Erhard, fills in this gap in the historical record.' Barry Eichengreen, University of California, Berkeley

'An amazing, revelatory biography that uncovers in lovingly pointillist, forensic detail a radically new history of the 1948 German currency reform, but also of the German social market economy, and in general of US occupation policy and the men and women who made it. Unputdownable history, the historical detective work of a master.' Harold James, author of Seven Crashes

'The introduction of the German Mark was the beginning of the West German postwar economic miracle. Its intellectual father was not Ludwig Erhard, but an American of Jewish-Polish decent, Edward Tenenbaum. Carl Holtfrerich's masterful biography finally does justice to the role of a man who deserves a monument in German economic history.' Moritz Schularick, President of the Kiel Institute for the World Economy