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Books : The Ascent of Money: A Financial History of the World |
List Price: $29.95Amazon.com's Price: $17.61 You Save: $12.34 (41%)Prices subject to change.
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Binding: Hardcover
Dewey Decimal Number: 332.09
EAN: 9781594201929
ISBN: 1594201927
Label: Penguin Press HC, The
Manufacturer: Penguin Press HC, The
Number Of Items: 1
Number Of Pages: 432
Publication Date: November 13, 2008
Publisher: Penguin Press HC, The
Studio: Penguin Press HC, The
Sales Rank: 58
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Editorial Review:
Product Description:
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.
Average Rating: 
Rating:  -
Have you ever wondered how banking started? How the South really lost the war? What really happened last year on Wall Street? This book explains the real reason behind nearly every historical event for the past 800 years.
Rating:  -
There are many, many excellent books addressing the current economic crisis, the utter failure of deregulation, the outrageous excesses, looting and crimes of Wall Street, the destruction of the middle class, the horrid debt burden left for our children, the fantastic increase in disparity between the haves and have-nots--in short, the destruction of the American way of life as we have known it.
Don't get your history and analysis from a right-wing apologist for Wall Street and the ultra ... Read More
Rating: -
We are all experts when it comes to money (or at least real estate), but none of us really knows much history. For if we knew the history of booms and busts, bonds and equities, risk and insurance then we may all be a little less likely to jump into the latest bubble, and a little more likely to question our own "expertise". I admire Ferguson for taking on a big topic, and for his willingness to provide a grand sweep of history that reflects and helps us understand our current recession. The book was ... Read More
Rating:  -
Ferguson comes up again as an unabashed defender of empire(s), especially those espousing financial capitalism as modus operandi. So much so that he touches revisionist overtones at times.
Had this been just a history book, however partial, Ascent of Money would have been only half bad. However, Ferguson's ideological positions only add insult to the periodic injury produced by financial capitalism.
Staying with history for a while, the book makes for a quick traversal of modern ... Read More
Rating: -
In these hard times, we really could use an up-to-date, thoughtful reappraisal of the history of finance and the role it has played in advancing and periodically severely retarding economic and political development around the world.
Unfortunately this is not it.
Prof. Ferguson, who divides his time between Harvard and Oxford, has become the "James Michener" of world history. He writes effusively on everything from "Britain's contributions to civilization" and "warfare in the 20th ... Read More
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