The subtitle of the book "A Financial History of the World" is something of a misnomer, though Ferguson (also the author of a two-volume history of the Rothschild family) does cover quite a bit of ground, in time and space, discussing how money evolved, and then how other kinds of financial transactions (stocks, bonds, derivatives) evolved. And that is why, whether you're scraping by or rolling in it, there's never been a better time to understand the ascent of money.
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 and sooner or later greed flips into fear. 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. He also delves into the origins of the subprime mortgage crisis.
#THE ASCENT OF MONEY FREE#
Ferguson travels to post-Katrina New Orleans to ask why the free market can't provide adequate protection against catastrophe. 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? With the clarity and verve for which he is known, Ferguson elucidates key financial institutions and concepts by showing where they came from. And the origins of the French Revolution are traced back to a stock market bubble caused by a convicted Scot murderer. The rise of the Dutch republic is reinterpreted as the triumph of the world's first modern bond market over insolvent Habsburg absolutism. 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. Through Ferguson's expert lens, familiar historical landmarks appear in a new and sharper financial focus. What's more, he reveals financial history as the essential back story behind all history. But in The Ascent of Money, Niall Ferguson shows that finance is, in fact, the foundation of human progress. To revolutionaries, it's the chains of labor. To Christians, love of it is the root of all evil. Bread, cash, dough, loot, moolah, readies, the wherewithal: Call it what you like, it matters.
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