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Book Description
Watch the PBS program based on The Ascent of Money.
Niall Ferguson follows the money to tell the human story behind the evolution of finance, from its origins in ancient Mesopotamia to the latest upheavals on what he calls Planet Finance.
Bread, cash, dosh, dough, loot, lucre, moolah, readies, the wherewithal: Call it what you like, it matters. To Christians, love of it is the root of all evil. To generals, it’s the sinews of war. To revolutionaries, it’s the chains of labor. But in The Ascent of Money, Niall Ferguson shows that finance is in fact the foundation of human progress. What’s more, he reveals financial history as the essential backstory behind all history.
Through Ferguson’s expert lens familiar historical landmarks appear in a new and sharper financial focus. Suddenly, the civilization of the Renaissance looks very different: a boom in the market for art and architecture made possible when Italian bankers adopted Arabic mathematics. The rise of the Dutch republic is reinterpreted as the triumph of the world’s first modern bond market over insolvent Habsburg absolutism. And the origins of the French Revolution are traced back to a stock market bubble caused by a convicted Scot murderer.
With the clarity and verve for which he is known, Ferguson elucidates key financial institutions and concepts by showing where they came from. What is money? What do banks do? What’s the difference between a stock and a bond? Why buy insurance or real estate? And what exactly does a hedge fund do?
This is history for the present. Ferguson travels to post-Katrina New Orleans to ask why the free market can’t provide adequate protection against catastrophe. He delves into the origins of the subprime mortgage crisis.
Perhaps most important, The Ascent of Money documents how a new financial revolution is propelling the world’s biggest countries, India and China, from poverty to wealth in the space of a single generation—an economic transformation unprecedented in human history.
Yet the central lesson of the financial history is that sooner or later every bubble bursts—sooner or later the bearish sellers outnumber the bullish buyers, sooner or later greed flips into fear. And that’s why, whether you’re scraping by or rolling in it, there’s never been a better time to understand the ascent of money.
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Most helpful customer reviews
40 of 41 people found the following review helpful
5.0 out of 5 stars
History Speaks for Itself,
By Ian Gordon Malcomson (Victoria, BC) - See all my reviews (HALL OF FAME) (TOP 10 REVIEWER) (REAL NAME)
This review is from: The Ascent of Money: A Financial History of the World (Hardcover)
As Ferguson points out so clearly in his latest book, "Ascent of Money", money and its propagation have become the chief driving forces of modern history. Like it or not, society's love affair with money has driven it to devise all kinds of ingenious means for expanding its power to produce more. This study looks at a number of fascinating scenarios where the Medicis, the Rothschilds, the Bank of England, the Paris stock exchange, the insurance industry and Wall Street have all done their bit to raise the historical significance of hard cash to a stratospheric level where it is no longer just a tangible piece of paper but is now a universal abstraction called credit. At the heart of the matter is the individual and corporate need to generate economic growth by creating monetary opportunity. Money only circulates effectively in society if people can trust its value as a medium of exchange for goods and services. If production falters, as it is presently, money can quickly devalue. Ferguson goes well beyond looking at the conventional realms of money as a basic specie to analyzing the inflated world of credit instruments such as bonds, debentures, bills of exchange, stocks, swaps, derivatives, mortgages, and credit cards. While money has expanded to include a variety of uses which have encouraged western civilization to modernize in leaps and bounds, it has come with a terrible price: failure to know when to exercise restraint and moderation in the rush to get rich quickly. It is this excessive behaviour in war, peace, and prosperity that compels many to take incredible risks with their own money and that borrowed from traditional sources like banks. Offsetting every optimistic prospect of making money is the ever-present fear that it could be just as easily lost. We have now reached a point in history where the expected and projected big growth of the past decades is slowly being replaced by a long-term forecast of lower and even negative growth due to our inability to keep ahead of the investment curve. The traditional power and lure of money may no longer be able to sustain our personal and collective drive to make and keep wealth. Ferguson is one of those big picture historians who fills his writing with lots of interesting stories to make his point. Very informative read!
34 of 38 people found the following review helpful
4.0 out of 5 stars
Money Makes the World Go Round,
By
This review is from: The Ascent of Money: A Financial History of the World (Hardcover)
The latest book by Harvard professor and popular commentator Niall Ferguson is a historical look at the rise of finance. Ever wonder how the stock market came to be? Exactly how and why did the evolution of credit lead to the rise of civilizations? Could all the world's conflicts be explained by economics? These are the historical questions Ferguson poses and attempts to answer in "The Ascent of Money."Ferguson's primary purpose for the book is by using economic history to help explain the complexities of modern financial institutions. Why, might you ask is this important? Because the average person knows little to nothing about such simple financial facts such as the interest rate charged by their credit card. Never before, in this globalized, highly coupled world that we live in today, has financial knowledge and a fundamental understanding of financial institutions been more important than it is today. Everyone is affected by world markets, interest rates, and inflation one way or another. Some reviewers have critiqued the book for its lack of historical breadth, and to some extent I would agree. However, the book is already 350+ pages, and more historical examples would dilute Ferguson's arguments. As ambitious as it is to try to explain such a complicated subject, Ferguson is mostly on the mark. I highly recommend this book for anyone who wants to know more about the history of finance.
20 of 23 people found the following review helpful
5.0 out of 5 stars
A swashbuckling tale of... Economics!,
This review is from: The Ascent of Money: A Financial History of the World (Hardcover)
This is an exciting book of adventure and international historical intrigue that kept me reading into the night! I'm serious... and I'm an artist, not a business woman. Ferguson did an excellent job of intertwining our current economic crisis with the financial histories he chose to include in his book. It made his subject more relevant, and unfortunately, more perilous.As a non-business person I learned so much about financial history and contemporary economics, all in an entertaining format. "The Ascent of Money" is must-reading for these times.
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