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Online Store - The Ascent of Money: A Financial History of the World
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List Price: $29.95
Our Price: $17.61
Your Save: $ 12.34 ( 41% )
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Manufacturer: Penguin Press HC, The
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Average Customer Rating:  
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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: 2008-11-13
Publisher: Penguin Press HC, The
Studio: Penguin Press HC, The
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Editorial Reviews:
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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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Spotlight customer reviews:
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Customer Rating:
Summary: How things *really* work...
Comment: 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.
Customer Rating:
Summary: Don't get your history and analysis from a Wall Street apologist
Comment: 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-wealthy, who likes to blame the poor and middle class victims for the horrid, downhill course of the last 30 years.
Save your money and shop around--there are much, much better analyses than this revisionist history and propaganda piece.
Customer Rating:
Summary: History of Dinero
Comment: 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 apparently written to accompany a documentary series, and it certainly reads that way. This is good and bad...and the narrative moves along quickly and big lessons are drawn - while at times leaving the reader wanting more analysis. One question that the author poses keeps coming back to me - have we been living through a "super bubble" from the 1950s to today, which will see a slow deflation in our lifetimes as property values stagnate and China is no longer willing to fund our consumption through their savings?
Grade: B+
Customer Rating:
Summary: If Harvard leadership amounts to this much we deserve it all and much more to come
Comment: 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 financial instruments and some of the supporting institutions and ideologies. Assuming the role of historian of finance, Ferguson doesn't seem to worry about proving anything; a narrative from the perspective of the victors, in (t)his case, the Anglo-Saxon financial elites, might do just as well. One comes away with the idea that financial capitalism is better, necessary, and almost always self-sufficient. Moreover, the welfare state should be viewed not only as a half-baked idea of capitalists, but also past its due date by now.
Here are few examples of missing pieces from Ferguson's take one the rise of financial capitalism: Nowhere is the goal of financial capitalism explicitly stated. I would posit that financial markets are supposed to help/guide us to do the best resource allocation (read, optimal) with the idea of maximizing social welfare. The "us" above is the state and voting citizenry, and not the financial elites alone. Without any compass at work, it's easy for the author to ignore the societal costs of financial capitalism--in the UK/US case, the disappearance of production followed by de-professionalization, and misallocation of resources during, and in the aftermath of, bubbles. In other words, if we look only at what financial capitalism creates, in isolation from other countries or its own side effects, Ferguson's book is right on the money. Otherwise, the market as compass is just as accurate as communism.
Ferguson doesn't seem to make much of his own statistics on how much more we spend on, let's say, healthcare and education for much lower returns. In fact, Schumpeter himself, one of the apostles of capitalism, once said that one of our problems in the US was the professional quality, or lack thereof, of our government employees. Hmm, could this have anything to do with how financial capitalism allocates human resources and/or how a society worships the high priests of finance?
In any case, fear not the current crisis, for Ferguson has embarked into the next expedition of financial capitalism as charted by the Harvard behavioral finance-, and MIT's Andrew Lo's financial evolutionist/adaptive markets-hypotheses. He does so by means of the last chapter in the book, a veritable illustration of plus ça change, plus c'est la même chose. In plain English, it's just the tools and possibly the actors that needed change, provided that the masters, ideology and the fools remain the same.
Rating this book is not easy. It should take 4 stars for the historic part, 2 stars for ideology, and 0 stars for partiality. All in all, for a 2-star book the interested reader may do better to borrow. And, yes, it reads fast and there is plenty of detail surrounded by historical context that make Ascent of Money a decent read.
Nota Bene: Why is it that, in this book, Niall Ferguson writes so dismissively about George Soros' ideas on financial markets reflexivity? Soros has built his fortune also by leveraging the reflexivity he recommends be tamed by adequate understanding and regulation of the financial markets. Unfortunately, Ascent of Money contributes only partially to that understating, and reads little about financial markets regulation.
Customer Rating:
Summary: Should be titled "The Descent of Harvard"
Comment: 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 century" to "the Rothschilds." Having dipped into several of his long-winded tomes, I can honestly say that the game has seldom been worth the candle.
And now this. Here a documentary project for Channel 13 evidently drove this "Ascent" book project, with predictable consequences -- jump cuts from subject to subject that leave readers almost sea-sick; topic choices that seem to have been made for video potential and notoriety, not objective importance; "mile wide, inch deep" scholarship that yields a very large pile of half-truths and incomplete thoughts.
I did like his chapter on housing finance, though it raised many more questions than it answered, and seemed to suggest that ignorant residential borrowers had more to do with the current debacle than, say, trillions in derivatives issued by Wall Street banks and insured by outfits like AIG.
Clearly the faults are not for want of ability. Where Prof. Ferguson actually gets up out of the armchair and does some first-hand research, as in his treatment of the Rothschilds, we get a few moments of serious, original scholarship.
Beyond that, and a few colorful tales, the book amounts to coffee table nostrums for readers who want to be reassured that the "wall is not coming down" on our Capitalist Empire.
Among Prof. Ferguson's comforting conclusions: (1) finance capitalism really is the best of all possible worlds, at least in the long run; (2) hedge funds and global banks really are wonderful new instruments for "guarding against risk"; (3) "financial innovation" really is "indispensable" -- despite all the innovation in REGULATION that this wizardry seems to constantly requires; and (4) "poverty" is NEVER "caused by" financial innovation -- a conclusion that Ferguson repeats over and over, never with any evidence. (This one may come as a surprise to the 2 billion citizens of low-income countries outside China and India whose incomes utterly failed to grow from the late 1970s to 2000 because of "Third World sub-prime loans."
The book also contains any number of factual errors. The dollar has strengthened, not declined, during current financial crisis. China and other Asian countries have hardly "decoupled;" quite the reverse. Chile's 17-year flirtation with fascism under the corrupt, bloodthirsty Pinochet regime was a horribly costly mistake, not some interesting little experiment with privatized pension funds. China's economic backwardness in the 19th was not due to a shortage of financial institutions (which are not an "uncaused cause" of anything) but to -- as Ferguson, contra ipsum, seems to acknowledge -- the impact of Western imperialism on China's weak state; Ken Griffin's Citadel hedge fund is hardly a work of genius, but a monumental failure; etc. etc. etc.
In short, this is a dumbed down, pollyanish, made-for-TV "hasty pudding" of a book. Its success - like the mortgage debacle itself - is based largely on hype and the "impeccable reputation" of its principle "securitizer."
We need to remember two golden rules of book selection -- (1) always be suspicious whenever a film project leads to a book, rather than the reverse; and (2) always be suspicious of any book whose title is printed in a smaller font than that of the author's own name.
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