Making Money

by Terry Pratchett

Moist von Lipwig thrives on risk, on the thrill of almost getting caught. As Postmaster General he's finding he has to make his own danger. Opportunities for narrow escapes are thin on the ground since he's turned the Post Office around and become a pillar of the establishment.

Lord Vetinari offers Moist the chance to take over the Royal Mint. As an ex-conman he's all too aware of the trouble large sums of money can attract, and he is reluctant to take on the job. But Vetinari can be persuasive.

The Bank has been in the Lavish family for generations, a family of old money whose members are habitually at each other's throats. The Bankers, with their long black frock coats, top hats, and severe countenances come across with all the seriousness of funeral directors and the liveliness of the long dead. Yet the more Moist gets to know about these people, the more he notices that there is something off about most of them.

The bank is losing money on its small denomination coins, which cost far more to make than their face value. The bankers are obsessed with gold, which for years has been used to back the currency. When Moist introduces changes and threatens to abandon gold as a basis for the currency this brings uncertainty, and fears of a run on the bank.

Cosmo Lavish is particularly irked by the current state of affairs, since he was hoping to inherit control of the bank himself. Cosmo likes to imitate Vetinari, and he's not above hiring assassins to cover his tracks and achieve his goals. For a profession that appears so outwardly respectable there are a lot of extremely eccentric and even outright crazy people involved with it.

Meanwhile, the chain-smoking, stiletto-stamping activist Adora Belle Dearheart is on a crusade to liberate golems. She works for the Golem Trust, and she's keen to excavate and set free any golems she finds, no matter who it upsets.

Making Money is an excellent satire on the fickle world of finance. It's an insightful novel about the way a whiff of a rumour of a whisper can turn a crisis into a triumph, and back again. The characters are vivid, the dialogue witty, and the plot is loaded with surprises and ironic situations. It's one of the subtler books in the Discworld series, but still a delight.