Product Description

Bread, cash, dosh, dough, loot: 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 labour. 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 back-story behind all history. The evolution of credit and debt was as important as any technological innovation in the rise of civilization, from ancient Babylon to the silver mines of Bolivia. Banks provided the material basis for the splendours of the Italian Renaissance, while the bond market was the decisive factor in conflicts from the Seven Years’ War to the American Civil War. With the clarity and verve for which he is famed, Niall Ferguson explains why the origins of the French Revolution lie in a stock market bubble caused by a convicted Scots murderer. He shows how financial failure turned Argentina from the world’s sixth richest country into an inflation-ridden basket case – and how a financial revolution is propelling the world’s most populous country from poverty to power in a single generation. Yet the most important 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.

Product Details

• Amazon Sales Rank: #24 in Books
• Published on: 2008-10-30
• Original language: English
• Binding: Hardcover
• 464 pages

Review
'Niall Ferguson has written a fascinating, accessible, and important book that lives up to its rather grandiose title ... It goes from cowrie shells to mortgage-backed securities, and everything in between ... this is an exceptional book.' - Michael Casey, Irish Times

From prolific historian Ferguson (History/Harvard Univ.; The War of the World, 2006, etc.), a sweeping survey of money and its many instruments.Some years ago, writes Ferguson, a hitherto unknown tribe appeared at the edge of the Amazonian rainforest. The people had subsisted for generations on hunting and gathering. They had no conception of money; not surprisingly, Ferguson adds, they had no concept of futurity, either. Now they live near a city, subsisting on food brought by strangers with no demand for anything in return. Shedding the hunting-and-gathering lifestyle was a first step toward the larger prosperity of humankind, Ferguson suggests - contra Marshall Sahlins's Stone Age Economics (1974) - while other instruments compelled us farther along the evolutionary path. One was the development of credit and debt, "as important as any technological innovation in the rise of civilization, from ancient Babylon to present-day Hong Kong." Ferguson takes a view similar to that of Jacob Bronowski (the title being homage to The Ascent of Man), and he offers plenty of nuts-and-bolts information. Every day, $2 trillion changes hands, and every single second of the day someone is selling something to someone else, a far more congenial use of time and energy than war, counting coup and other pastimes of our tribe writ large. War, after all, is a leading cause of inflation, one of the constant enemies in Ferguson's pages; another is bad faith, which Ferguson attends to in a nicely scathing exegesis of the Enron affair. The author is a fluent interpreter, whether writing of the origins of the hedge fund, the workings of international trade deficits or the securitization of home mortgages - the last of which is the cause of so much current worry. He avoids the aridity of economics without skimping on details, offering lots of bang for the buck.A useful introduction to the world of drachmas, dinars and dollars. (Kirkus Reviews)

Review
`Niall Ferguson has written a fascinating, accessible, and important book that lives up to its rather grandiose title ... It goes from cowrie shells to mortgage-backed securities, and everything in between ... this is an exceptional book.'

Review
'Ferguson's powers are on formidable display ... Alone among modern economic historians, he is able to present complex data in a consistently revelatory manner.'

Customer Reviews

This is how we got to where we are; so, how do we get out of here?
Niall Ferguson again here brings us a history that is informative, entertaining and sobering. Being published in the midst of a global economic meltdown, for a book such as this, is a mixed blessing, as a step too far on the bearish side may make the author look like a doommonger, whilst being even slightly bullish might look blinkered. Ferguson, though, seems to manage to pull it off, though that equally is a spot evaluation. However, though it's clear where his loyalties lie in the pro/anti capitalism debate, the balance of the narrative tends nevertheless towards the various shocks delivered to the system rather than towards the prosperity delivered, albeit still strictly speaking to a relative minority of humanity, by markets and their lubricant, money.

As it turned out, some of the ground covered was familiar territory to me, bringing together strands of other books I've read recently, including Findlay and O'Rourke's Power And Plenty, Bentley's A Book Of Numbers, Schama's The American Future and even Lonely Planet Andalucia.

But some of it was new. He gives the origins of ghetto (a geto was a casting, and the original ghetto was in Venice's foundry district); explains that a consol gets its name from "consolidated fund"; and confirms that "dollar" comes from the German "thaler", on which the Spanish based the piece of eight, the world's first truly global currency.

Ferguson is also adept at telling stories: his account of the First Opium War, for example, is probably the clearest I've come across, and in the chapter on housing there is an excellent explanation of how the development of securitisation by Salomons ultimately led to the sub-prime meltdown.

He's not always right. In a description of segregation in Detroit and the 1967 riots he describes Aretha Franklin as a Motown star, which she almost, but never quite, was. And the final chapter begins with speculation that the rest of the world has decoupled from the United States economically. Unfortunately time has not been kind to this notion, with only Brazil, it appears, unaffected so far (December 2008), oil down by over $100 a barrel from its mid-08 peak, and even China's growth looking very shaky. But if there are any signs that "His pages are hot with proof-stage tyremarks", as one newspaper review alleged, then Ferguson is not alone in his revisionism: after all, even the German finance minister got it wrong. And in mitigation, this is the man who ended a previous television series (Colossus) warning that the United States was "heading for a credit crunch".

This is not, to be sure, a technical book. Readers seeking more detail of some of the principles described should go to the likes of Brealey and Myers's Principles of Corporate Finance. However, Ferguson more than succeeds in achieving his objective of providing a foundation of financial awareness for the general reader, providing plenty of food for thought. Amongst the morsels on offer: in better days for Argentina, the other Harrods was in Buenos Aires; the birth of stock markets was in 17th Century Netherlands, a country now often reduced to two letters in "Benelux"; and he ultimately really hits the button marked Panic by reminding us of the consequences of al-Qaeda's effecting a nuclear strike, of a further Katrina-like event, or of inundation courtesy of global warming.

So, great book, and so much for the past, but what of the future? Ferguson describes himself as a "liberal fundamentalist", and certainly descriptions of him as "rightwing" look overdone. Nevertheless, there seems to be a faith implicit that capitalism can cure itself, counter to the standard Marxist analysis of a bankrupt and inevitably doomed system. So where, as Larry Elliott has asked, is the intellectually endorsed social democratic alternative? It is implicit, ironically, in the response of the US government, but the measures being taken by that and several other governments has the appearance of a huge geoeconomic experiment unsupported by any clear theory other than it is the opposite of what was done in the 1930s. What is needed is a Keynes for the noughties. I'm looking forward to reading Krugman's new work to see if that is where the gap is filled.

Comments by Michael Calum Jacques, author of '1st Century Radical'.
The title of this book makes quite a claim. Niall Ferguson is a Harvard University professor from the UK, who produced a volume on the story of the Rothschild financial dynasty in the late 1990s, The book certainly has a number of interesting features e.g. its summary of recent events both precipitating and within the housing market 'crisis' and international commercial relationships between superpowers. Nevertheless, the impression is that the work - fascinating though it is in parts - may just have been a little bit 'scraped together', somewhat hurried.

Given the lightening blitz which has rocked all corners, streets and avenues of the globe's financial institutions, this is perhaps understandable and even forgivable, almost. Recent news bulletins have featured housing crises, bank runs and a possible recession looming forbiddingly. Given that he presumably had only human resources at his disposal, the author may well have reached for a crystal ball as a source of greater predictability than the global market indicators have been able to offer any of us, himself included, of late.

Returning to our initial point, viz. the sheer scope this work claims to encompass, this reviewer particularly appreciated Ferguson's sweep through the civilisations of the past in this Financial History of the World; thus the Inca's spurning of gold and silver as money, the pre-Christian Mesopotamian/Babylonian credit notes in the form of clay tablets and many more indicators of the development of, and various civilisations' attitudes towards, money and finance in general. Yet Ferguson omits to make, as far as this reviewer can see, any reference to the light which spectral analysis technology (through its illumination of discarded domestic papyri texts) has thrown on the surprising wealth of certain women within the ancient world.

Ferguson's philosophy, which he keeps hidden up his sleeve for most of the book, proposes that finance evolves through natural selection. He uses this hypothesis to account for the appearance and denigration of new financial models which respond to new demands made by various societies. That analysis may risk a degree of oversimplification, but that will be variously assessed by the background, training, and disposition of the reader. All that being said, this is a challenging and a stimulating read.

Michael Calum Jacques