NEW BOOK: VALORES DE LA NACIÓN

I wanted to share with your readers a book published by Mexico's Ministry of Finance, in which I had the pleasure to contribute (available only in Spanish):

Few years ago, at the Ministry of Finance's printing facilities someone asked to empty a room to be able to store either passports or stamps that are normally printed there. The response was that the objects there did not belong to this office, but to the Federal Treasury. They asked the latter to empty such room and this story begins:

Apparently the Treasury had forgotten about this vault with thousands of stocks & bonds, and few boxes and bags of banknotes under their custody.

The MoF hired an expert on economic history, to make an inventory and find out what was about, and she kindly invited me to study the banknotes. This repository had nothing rare, but the size and variety of the collection was worth studying, and the MoF decided to publish a book in order to reveal the contents of this collection and invite scholars to further study it.

This is the book that resulted from such project. The first article describes the contents of the collection, putting in context the emissions of private and public debt throughout a century, from late 19th to late 20th Century. In the second article, I tried to describe the different roles played by the MoF around banknotes issuance, from authorization, validation, surveillance, custody, printing, exchange, withdrawal to their destruction throughout the story of this means of payment in Mexico, illustrated with samples of this collection, mainly comprised by notes from the revolution, including hundreds of UNC bundles. Finally, the last article written by the editor, shows how banking architecture, displayed in several banknotes in the late 19th Century showed the richness and economic wealth of those times.

To read the complete book, see:
https://bpo.sep.gob.mx/#/recurso/6406/document/1

	NBS (coinbooks.org) Web