The Ascent of Money: A Financial History of the World
Ratings17
Average rating4.1
Bread, cash, dough, loot, lucre, 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 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, with the development of credit and debt as important as any technological innovation in the rise of civilisation. 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.
Reviews
Popular Reviews
Reviews with the most likes.
Neither dense enough to be an actual ‘history of the world' level work, but neither light enough that you can dismiss it out of hand.
This book's fundamental argument is that poverty is not due to rapacious investors always on the hunt for more money to line their pockets, but instead due to a lack of such investors and institutions. Pretty bold argument, I have to admit. How does Mr. Ferguson back it up?
TL;DR, he doesn't. He mentions an isolated tribe in South America that is used to subsistence farming and hunting-gathering, and when they roamed out to make contact with the ‘civilized' world for the first time in history, they became a tribe of beggars. I failed to realize how this argument of money creation made any sense, and it is passages like these which frustrated me immensely, which do not make any sense even in context.
This argument is never directly (or indirectly) answered in what was supposed to be a ‘complete history' of the financial world. In my opinion, the title is very misleading - the book is simply an elaborate history of the biggest bubbles and bursts of the financial world - including the Spanish defeat of the Mayan empires causing a crash in gold/silver prices in the 16th and 17th centuries, the Latin American defaults of the 19th and 20th centuries, the Great Depression of 1929, and the so-called ‘second depression' of 2007-08. Mr. Ferguson credits the existence of institutions such as hedge funds and the Federal Reserve (US) for exacerbating such crises, which doesn't necessarily help his argument of the existence of such vast amounts of virtual layers of money somehow helping the common man's survival. In the course of describing such crises, he writes up the only good parts of the book - where you can actually see the modern-day forms of bonds, equities, hedge funds and insurance claims being formed.
Above all, you are supposed to learn something new from a book which totes itself as a history book. The only things one can take away from the book is that property is not a risk-free investment, you should have a diversified portfolio in order to make more money, saving/spending in excess is bad, and that the stock market runs on human whims, so never take it too seriously. All of which I already knew.
