The latest opus by British historian Niall Ferguson traces key developments in finance within the context of world history, from its roots in Mesopotamia to the new revolution driving the economies of the People’s Republic of China and India.
Ferguson is Laurence A. Tisch Professor of History at Harvard University, a Senior Research Fellow of Jesus College, Oxford University, and a Senior Fellow of the Hoover Institution at Stanford University. His books include bestsellers Paper and Iron, The House of Rothschild, The Pity of War, The Cash Nexus, Empire, and Colossus.
“(Ferguson) is at his strongest in his reading of the news. His story of what is happening today shows prescience, even if it is necessarily incomplete.” —The Economist.
“Ferguson takes us on an often enlightening and enjoyable spelunking tour through the underside of great events, a lesson in how the most successful great powers have always been underpinned by smart money.” —Michael Hirsh, Sunday Book Review, The New York Times.
Summary book from PRINT EDITION ; THE typical career of a Wall Street banker lasts about a quarter of a century, enough to span just one big financial crisis. As Niall Ferguson explains in his new book, “The Ascent of Money”, which will be published next month, today’s senior financiers would have started out in 1983, fully ten years after oil and gold prices first began the surge that had ruined the previous generation of money men. That, he concludes, is a “powerful justification for the study of financial history.”
Mr Ferguson is right.
The world needs a book that puts today’s crisis into context. It is too late now to warn investors about expensive houses and financiers about cheap credit. But perhaps the past can help make sense of the wreckage of banks, brokers and hedge funds that litters the markets. Looking back may help suggest what to do next.
And when the crisis is over and it is time for the great reckoning, the lessons of history should inform the arguments about what must change. This rushed, uneven book, by a British-born Harvard University professor who made his name a decade ago with a history of the Rothschild banking dynasty, will contribute less than expected to that debate.
It has strengths, including a tidy account of the run-up in housing markets and of the symbiotic rivalry between America and China. But in the earlier chapters—the history, oddly enough, where you would expect Mr Ferguson’s ambitions for his subject to quicken his judgments—the words rarely come to life, either as a source of ideas or as narrative. Perhaps the book was bound to be flawed, given the pace with which today’s crisis has torn through the markets.
As the debacle has unfolded, from a housing crisis, to a credit bust, a bank run and what now looks ominously like a global recession, each episode has posed different questions. Finishing his manuscript in May this year, Mr Ferguson must have been dizzy with the unravelling of certainties. And yet, he is at his strongest in his reading of the news. His story of what is happening today shows prescience, even if it is necessarily incomplete. It may be that Mr Ferguson was too distracted by the present to pay enough attention to the past.
Claiming to be “A Financial History of the World”, the book dutifully dabbles in societies, such as the Inca, who did not see gold and silver as money, and in the pre-Christian Mesopotamian clay tablets that served as credit notes for commodities. He traces the transformation of banchieri, named for the benches where money was changed, into the families that dominated the political and cultural life of Renaissance Italy and from there into modern bankers.
He explains how the bond market had its origins in the state’s need for money to finance war. He describes how manias have repeatedly engulfed greedy investors over the centuries—concentrating on John Law, whose schemes ruined 18th-century France. And he rehearses the story of financial risk from its origins in Enlightenment Scotland. Yet the reader is left wondering quite who the book is aimed at.
The finance specialist will not find enough here to begin to compete with the work of Charles Kindleberger, an economic historian. And the reader who wants to know how finance is interwoven with general history would do better to turn to Jeffry Frieden’s excellent 2006 work, “Global Capitalism”.
Mr Ferguson may seem to be speaking to a general audience, given that he has taken his title from “The Ascent of Man”, Jacob Bronowksi’s book and television series of a quarter-century ago which analysed the contribution of science to civilisation. Yet these readers will be baffled by passages that breezily toss around ideas like “sterilisation”—the issue of bonds by a government to mop up the inflation-inducing money it prints to buy foreign currency.
And they may be put off by Mr Ferguson’s attempt to be jolly. After two and half pages on the mathematics of bond yields, for example, comes this quip: “So how did this ‘Mr Bond’ become so much more powerful than the Mr Bond created by Ian Fleming? Why, indeed, do both kinds of bond have a licence to kill?” Of far greater interest is Mr Ferguson’s general theory, which does not emerge until the end of the book.
He thinks that finance evolves through natural selection. Although the professor cautions against the sort of Darwinism that sees evolution as progress, he believes that new sorts of finance are constantly coming into being as the environment changes.
The sequence of creation, selection and destruction is what has generated many of the financial techniques that modern economies depend on. This leads Mr Ferguson to make two timely points. One is to remember that evolution depends on extinction as well as creation.
You have to allow ill-adapted techniques to fail if you are going to get something new. As the world rushes around rescuing every bank in sight, it is a reminder that the guarantor-state will later have to administer painful medicine. The other is to observe the wonder of what financial evolution has created.
Just now it is only natural to think of the “roller-coaster ride of ups and downs, bubbles and busts, manias and panics, shocks and crashes.”
But Mr Ferguson sees something else too: “From ancient Mesopotamia to present-day China…the ascent of money has been one of the driving forces behind human progress: a complex process of innovation, intermediation and integration that has been as vital as the advance of science or the spread of law in mankind’s escape from the drudgery of subsistence agriculture and the misery of the Malthusian trap.” Amid this financial bust, cleave to that.
Related Tags ; Money Magnet Meditations - Law of Wealth Attraction Market
, The Ascent of Money: A Financial History of the World By Niall Ferguson
, The Ascent of Money (Chinese Edition)
, Commanding Heights: The Battle for the World Economy
, The ascent of money / Voskhozhdenie deneg
, The War of the World: A New History of the 20th Century
, The House of Rothschild: Volume 2: The World's Banker: 1849-1999
The world needs a book that puts today’s crisis into context. It is too late now to warn investors about expensive houses and financiers about cheap credit. But perhaps the past can help make sense of the wreckage of banks, brokers and hedge funds that litters the markets. Looking back may help suggest what to do next.
And when the crisis is over and it is time for the great reckoning, the lessons of history should inform the arguments about what must change. This rushed, uneven book, by a British-born Harvard University professor who made his name a decade ago with a history of the Rothschild banking dynasty, will contribute less than expected to that debate.
It has strengths, including a tidy account of the run-up in housing markets and of the symbiotic rivalry between America and China. But in the earlier chapters—the history, oddly enough, where you would expect Mr Ferguson’s ambitions for his subject to quicken his judgments—the words rarely come to life, either as a source of ideas or as narrative. Perhaps the book was bound to be flawed, given the pace with which today’s crisis has torn through the markets.
As the debacle has unfolded, from a housing crisis, to a credit bust, a bank run and what now looks ominously like a global recession, each episode has posed different questions. Finishing his manuscript in May this year, Mr Ferguson must have been dizzy with the unravelling of certainties. And yet, he is at his strongest in his reading of the news. His story of what is happening today shows prescience, even if it is necessarily incomplete. It may be that Mr Ferguson was too distracted by the present to pay enough attention to the past.
Claiming to be “A Financial History of the World”, the book dutifully dabbles in societies, such as the Inca, who did not see gold and silver as money, and in the pre-Christian Mesopotamian clay tablets that served as credit notes for commodities. He traces the transformation of banchieri, named for the benches where money was changed, into the families that dominated the political and cultural life of Renaissance Italy and from there into modern bankers.
He explains how the bond market had its origins in the state’s need for money to finance war. He describes how manias have repeatedly engulfed greedy investors over the centuries—concentrating on John Law, whose schemes ruined 18th-century France. And he rehearses the story of financial risk from its origins in Enlightenment Scotland. Yet the reader is left wondering quite who the book is aimed at.
The finance specialist will not find enough here to begin to compete with the work of Charles Kindleberger, an economic historian. And the reader who wants to know how finance is interwoven with general history would do better to turn to Jeffry Frieden’s excellent 2006 work, “Global Capitalism”.
Mr Ferguson may seem to be speaking to a general audience, given that he has taken his title from “The Ascent of Man”, Jacob Bronowksi’s book and television series of a quarter-century ago which analysed the contribution of science to civilisation. Yet these readers will be baffled by passages that breezily toss around ideas like “sterilisation”—the issue of bonds by a government to mop up the inflation-inducing money it prints to buy foreign currency.
And they may be put off by Mr Ferguson’s attempt to be jolly. After two and half pages on the mathematics of bond yields, for example, comes this quip: “So how did this ‘Mr Bond’ become so much more powerful than the Mr Bond created by Ian Fleming? Why, indeed, do both kinds of bond have a licence to kill?” Of far greater interest is Mr Ferguson’s general theory, which does not emerge until the end of the book.
He thinks that finance evolves through natural selection. Although the professor cautions against the sort of Darwinism that sees evolution as progress, he believes that new sorts of finance are constantly coming into being as the environment changes.
The sequence of creation, selection and destruction is what has generated many of the financial techniques that modern economies depend on. This leads Mr Ferguson to make two timely points. One is to remember that evolution depends on extinction as well as creation.
You have to allow ill-adapted techniques to fail if you are going to get something new. As the world rushes around rescuing every bank in sight, it is a reminder that the guarantor-state will later have to administer painful medicine. The other is to observe the wonder of what financial evolution has created.
Just now it is only natural to think of the “roller-coaster ride of ups and downs, bubbles and busts, manias and panics, shocks and crashes.”
But Mr Ferguson sees something else too: “From ancient Mesopotamia to present-day China…the ascent of money has been one of the driving forces behind human progress: a complex process of innovation, intermediation and integration that has been as vital as the advance of science or the spread of law in mankind’s escape from the drudgery of subsistence agriculture and the misery of the Malthusian trap.” Amid this financial bust, cleave to that.
Related Tags ; Money Magnet Meditations - Law of Wealth Attraction Market
, The Ascent of Money: A Financial History of the World By Niall Ferguson, The Ascent of Money (Chinese Edition), Commanding Heights: The Battle for the World Economy, The ascent of money / Voskhozhdenie deneg, The War of the World: A New History of the 20th Century, The House of Rothschild: Volume 2: The World's Banker: 1849-1999
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