The Ascent of Money: A Financial History of the World
By Niall Ferguson
* Publisher: Penguin Press HC, The
* Number Of Pages: 432
* Publication Date: 2008-11-13
* ISBN-10 / ASIN: 1594201927
* ISBN-13 / EAN: 9781594201929
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%u2019s the sinews of war. To revolutionaries, it%u2019s the chains of labor. But in The Ascent of Money, Niall Ferguson shows that finance is in fact the foundation of human progress. What%u2019s more, he reveals financial history as the essential backstory behind all history.
Through Ferguson%u2019s 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%u2019s 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%u2019s 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%u2019t 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%u2019s biggest countries, India and China, from poverty to wealth in the space of a single generation%u2014an economic transformation unprecedented in human history.
Yet the central lesson of the financial history is that sooner or later every bubble bursts%u2014sooner or later the bearish sellers outnumber the bullish buyers, sooner or later greed flips into fear. And that%u2019s why, whether you%u2019re scraping by or rolling in it, there%u2019s never been a better time to understand the ascent of money.
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