In 1545, the richest vein of silver ever found split open a mountain in the Andes. The flood of new money made Spain an empire, enriched the merchants and the crown who stood beside the flow, and left the laborers, the savers, and the distant subjects to meet rising prices with wages that lagged behind. Five centuries later, central banks conjure trillions with a keystroke, and the same pattern holds: new money enters the world at a point, rewards whoever stands nearest, and arrives at the far end of the line late, thinned, and worth less than it was at the source.

Richard Cantillon described the mechanism three hundred years ago, practiced it with cold brilliance inside John Law's paper mania, and died in a fire so suspicious that some believed he staged his own death. The effect that bears his name has remained a specialist's concept ever since. This book argues it belongs in the open, where the people it costs the most can finally see it.

From Potosí to the assignats of Revolutionary France, from the railway boom to the telecom crash, from quantitative easing and the pandemic economy to the trillions now flooding into artificial intelligence, The Nearest Hand follows a single question across five hundred years: where does new purchasing power first become spendable, and who is standing there? The book turns its argument over to its sharpest critics in a full chapter, concedes what honesty requires, and ends with the person at the far end of the line, who did the work, kept the rules, and received last, and with the question of what a decent society owes them.