Every day I bring you an item on Amazon that I personally use or has been purchased by many members of the audience and I have researched enough to recommend.

Today’s TSP Amazon Item of the day is Broken Money: Why Our Financial System Is Failing Us and How We Can Make It Better by Lyn Alden.  If you’ve already read The Fiat Standard, this book is a powerful follow-up. You don’t have to read them in order, but doing so adds useful context. While The Fiat Standard focuses on what fiat is and why it exists, Broken Money digs into how and why it’s failing—and not just in economic theory, but in real-world consequences.

This book traces the evolution of money from physical exchange to abstract ledgers. Alden lays out the core idea that money is a form of technology, a ledger system for value exchange and that changes in communication and settlement have shaped how money works. From early coinage to the telegraph to modern banking and beyond, she explains how we moved away from sound money and got into the mess we’re in now.

One standout piece is her discussion of the hawala networks, informal value transfer systems that still operate in parts of the world to this day even though they date back to the 1300s. These private money transmitters rely entirely on trust and written ledgers to move money internationally, no banks or state involvement. It’s a reminder that money systems have always existed outside of centralized control, and some still do.  This shows that the need to move money across both space and time is not a new problem.

Where the book really hits hard is in showing just how much depends on money functioning properly. Money is half of every transaction so when the money itself breaks, it touches everything. Trade, savings, investment, wages, pricing, production—it’s all downstream from money. And if the foundation is off, then everything built on top of it starts to tilt. That’s the heart of this book: our money is broken, and because of that, everything else is quietly coming apart too.

Money is half of every transaction so when the money itself breaks, it touches everything.  Read that one again and again, let it sink in!

The core of the book is a breakdown of the structural problems baked into fiat. It’s not about political blame or policy tweaks. It’s about a system that replaces savings with debt, stability with manipulation, and long-term planning with short-term fixes. And it’s not working anymore—not for regular people, not for small businesses, not for future generations.

Alden doesn’t hype Bitcoin or push a single solution. She just lays out the timeline and consequences, clearly and methodically. If you want to understand why money feels broken, why saving is harder, why booms and busts feel constant and with larger swings, why nothing seems to settle, this book explains it all.

Broken Money is one of the clearest, most grounded explanations of how money fails and what that failure looks like in practice. Read it after The Fiat Standard if you can, and definitely before The Bitcoin Standard. It’ll change the way you see every dollar, every paycheck, and every financial headline from here on out. So check out Broken Money by Lyn Alden today or at least add it to your must read list, you can thank me later.