is bored with his job as the Postmaster General of the Ankh-Morpork Post Office, which is running smoothly without any challenges, so the Patrician tries to persuade him to take over the Royal Bank of Ankh-Morpork and the Royal Mint. Moist, content with his new lifestyle, refuses. However, when the current chairwoman, Topsy Lavish, dies, she leaves 50% of the shares in the bank to her dog, Mr Fusspot, and she leaves the dog to Moist. She also made sure that the Assassins' Guild would fulfill a contract on Moist if anything unnatural happens to the dog or he does not do as her last will commands. With no alternatives, Moist takes over the bank and finds out that people do not trust banks much, that the production of money runs slowly and at a loss, and that people now use stamps as currency rather than coins. His various ambitious changes include making money that is not backed by gold but by the city itself. Unfortunately, neither the chief cashier nor the Lavish family are too happy with him and try to dispose of him. Cosmo Lavish tries to go one step further — he attempts to replace Vetinari by taking on his identity — with little success. However all the while, the reappearance of a character from von Lipwig's past adds more pressure to his unfortunate scenario. Moist's fiancée, Adora Belle Dearheart, is working with the Golem Trust in the meantime to uncover golems from the ancient civilization of Um. She succeeds in bringing them to the city, and to everyone's surprise the "four golden golems" turn out to be "four thousand golems" and so the city is at risk of being at war with other cities who might find an army of 4000 golems threatening. Moist discovers the secret to controlling the golems, and manages to order them to bury themselves outside the city and then decides that these extremely valuable golems are a much better foundation for the new currency than gold and thus introduces the golem-based currency. Eventually, an anonymous clacks message goes out to the leaders of other cities that contains the secret to controlling the golems, thus making them unsuitable for use in warfare. At the end of the novel, Lord Vetinari considers the advancing age of the current Chief Tax Collector, and suggests that upon his retirement a new name to take on the vacancy might present itself.
Themes
According to Pratchett, Making Money is both fantasy and non-fantasy, as money is a fantasy within the "real world", as "we've agreed that these numbers of conceptual things like dollars have a value".
Waterstone's include a few Ankh-Morpork bank notes
Reception
Kim Newman, writing for The Independent, called the book "on-the-nose and up-to-the-minute in its subject", praising the villain and the narration. The Guardians Patrick Ness praised the book's humanity, and its "sharp questions about why we trust banks as well as the nature of money", but noted that the book "is not quite as successful as" Going Postal due to the lack of some of Going Postals forward drive. The Observers Rowland Manthrope was critical of the book, saying that "Pratchett has wit here, but has lost his normal cutting edge". Nick Rennison, from The Sunday Times, said that while "Making Money is not vintage Discworld", "it still offers more comic inventiveness and originality than most other novels of the year. And more fun."
