How much damage have central bankers done? A lot.

What's Christmas and the New Year celebrations without a fight about money, a lunch-table villain and a really good book? For those interested, I have some suggestions that will give you all three in one happy package.

First up, someone must have a copy of "You Always Hurt the One You Love: Central Bankers and the Murder of Capitalism" by Bernard Connolly. You might not need much more than the title to get your row going. But it's worth reading on to nail down exactly why central bankers are almost entirely responsible for asset bubbles "unsupported by realistic expectations of future productivity," along with recent financial crises and disruptive wealth inequality. Their mistakes have been more obvious than usual in the last few years – their failure to recognise that fast-rising money supply would, with the usual 12- to 18-month lag, lead to inflation looks increasingly bizarre to even non-experts, for example.

But for Connolly this is nothing but the icing on a huge cake of intellectual failure, one that has been on the go since the mid-1990s — with Alan Greenspan as the foundation villain, the first to use low interest rates to pull economic activity forward and create an "intertemporal dislocation." There is much in here on the failings of central banks in general – negative real interest rates and the massive fiscal deficits they have forced are already having nasty consequences. But key to much of it has been their mission creep: It makes no sense, says Connolly, for the Fed "choose to reinterpret its mandate to take on sociopolitcal objectives – inclusive, green or whatever, admirable and necessary or not. To do so is "profoundly anti-democratic" (no one voted for central bankers to make these choices). All this could, and probably will, end very badly – although, if you make it to the final chapter you will find some glimmers of hope.

For more on how it's all central bankers' fault, follow Connolly with Edward Chancellor's excellent "The Price of Time", a history of interest rates. Distort the price of money, says Chancellor, and you distort the price of time, the present and the future move "out of whack." Overly low rates are in effect a type of "loan forbearance" that encourages investment and then traps capital in low- (or no-) return areas, something that has obvious effects on productivity.

The truth is that messing with the most important signal in markets, as our central bankers have, can only lead to productivity failure, economic insecurity and in the end social and cultural division. It has taken us 25 years to get ourselves into this position, says Chancellor (he is with Connolly on the mid-1990s being the starting point of the monetary-policy madness), and it could take a similarly long time for higher interest rates to correct capital allocation (and wealth inequality) and get us out of it.

How much social division might we see along the way? For that you must read another rather hefty book (I'm afraid none of these are the kind of light reading you can take on by the fire after a boozy Christmas lunch). This one is "Revolutionary Spring: Fighting for a New World 1848 – 1849" by Christopher Clark. The rebellions of the mid-19th century started in Palermo in January 1848 but spread "like a brush fire leaping from city to city and starting numerous spot fires in towns and villages in between." The French King was gone by the end of February and by the end of March there was exciting semi-democratic change underway across Europe. It was complicated, poorly planned, messy, "bristling with contradictions" – and it didn't last. But that, says Clark, doesn't mean that the movements were a failure. Far from it – post-1849 Europe was a very different place.

Read Clark over the holidays for the brilliance of his writing and reinterpretation of the impact of the revolutions. But as you do, recognise the way his history chimes with today: massive wealth inequality, "ambient anxiety" a sense that the "entire economic order was founded upon the exploitation by the stronger of the weaker" and an intense scrutiny on the relationship between capitalism and inequality. The questions asked then are being asked now, says Clark – and "have lost none of their urgency." I would only add that one of the features of the first part of the 1800s was fast-falling interest rates – and manias followed by crises. In the early 1800s, real yields in the UK had turned negative for the first time, for example, and in 1844 the UK Bank rate was 2%, and easy money was flooding to the US and to France. The Panic of 1847 fast followed. Credit bubble, economic crisis, revolution. There could be an echo there.

Disclaimer: This article first appeared on Bloomberg, and is published by special syndication arrangement.