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THE ASCENT OF MONEY

A financial history of the world.

by Niall Ferguson ‧ RELEASE DATE: Nov. 17, 2008

A useful introduction to the world of drachmas, dinars and dollars.

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.

Pub Date: Nov. 17, 2008

ISBN: 978-1-59420-192-9

Page Count: 400

Publisher: Penguin Press

Review Posted Online: May 19, 2010

Kirkus Reviews Issue: Oct. 1, 2008

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KILLERS OF THE FLOWER MOON

The osage murders and the birth of the fbi.

by David Grann ‧ RELEASE DATE: April 18, 2017

Dogged original research and superb narrative skills come together in this gripping account of pitiless evil.

Greed, depravity, and serial murder in 1920s Oklahoma.

During that time, enrolled members of the Osage Indian nation were among the wealthiest people per capita in the world. The rich oil fields beneath their reservation brought millions of dollars into the tribe annually, distributed to tribal members holding "headrights" that could not be bought or sold but only inherited. This vast wealth attracted the attention of unscrupulous whites who found ways to divert it to themselves by marrying Osage women or by having Osage declared legally incompetent so the whites could fleece them through the administration of their estates. For some, however, these deceptive tactics were not enough, and a plague of violent death—by shooting, poison, orchestrated automobile accident, and bombing—began to decimate the Osage in what they came to call the "Reign of Terror." Corrupt and incompetent law enforcement and judicial systems ensured that the perpetrators were never found or punished until the young J. Edgar Hoover saw cracking these cases as a means of burnishing the reputation of the newly professionalized FBI. Bestselling New Yorker staff writer Grann ( The Devil and Sherlock Holmes: Tales of Murder, Madness, and Obsession , 2010, etc.) follows Special Agent Tom White and his assistants as they track the killers of one extended Osage family through a closed local culture of greed, bigotry, and lies in pursuit of protection for the survivors and justice for the dead. But he doesn't stop there; relying almost entirely on primary and unpublished sources, the author goes on to expose a web of conspiracy and corruption that extended far wider than even the FBI ever suspected. This page-turner surges forward with the pacing of a true-crime thriller, elevated by Grann's crisp and evocative prose and enhanced by dozens of period photographs.

Pub Date: April 18, 2017

ISBN: 978-0-385-53424-6

Page Count: 352

Publisher: Doubleday

Review Posted Online: Feb. 1, 2017

Kirkus Reviews Issue: Feb. 15, 2017

GENERAL HISTORY | TRUE CRIME | UNITED STATES | FIRST/NATIVE NATIONS | HISTORY

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BOOK TO SCREEN

by Elie Wiesel & translated by Marion Wiesel ‧ RELEASE DATE: Jan. 16, 2006

The author's youthfulness helps to assure the inevitable comparison with the Anne Frank diary although over and above the...

Elie Wiesel spent his early years in a small Transylvanian town as one of four children. 

He was the only one of the family to survive what Francois Maurois, in his introduction, calls the "human holocaust" of the persecution of the Jews, which began with the restrictions, the singularization of the yellow star, the enclosure within the ghetto, and went on to the mass deportations to the ovens of Auschwitz and Buchenwald. There are unforgettable and horrifying scenes here in this spare and sombre memoir of this experience of the hanging of a child, of his first farewell with his father who leaves him an inheritance of a knife and a spoon, and of his last goodbye at Buchenwald his father's corpse is already cold let alone the long months of survival under unconscionable conditions. 

Pub Date: Jan. 16, 2006

ISBN: 0374500010

Page Count: 120

Publisher: Hill & Wang

Review Posted Online: Oct. 7, 2011

Kirkus Reviews Issue: Jan. 15, 2006

BIOGRAPHY & MEMOIR | HOLOCAUST | HISTORY | GENERAL BIOGRAPHY & MEMOIR | GENERAL HISTORY

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by Elie Wiesel ; edited by Alan Rosen

by Elie Wiesel ; illustrated by Mark Podwal

by Elie Wiesel ; translated by Marion Wiesel

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Books of The Times

It’s Still Making the World Go ’Round

• Share full article

By Michiko Kakutani

• Dec. 2, 2008

Niall Ferguson’s latest book, “The Ascent of Money: A Financial History of the World,” went to press in May 2008, but it shrewdly anticipates many aspects of the current financial crisis, which has toppled banks, precipitated gigantic government bailouts and upended global markets.

“Are we on the brink of a ‘great dying’ in the financial world,” Mr. Ferguson asks, “one of those mass extinctions of species that have occurred periodically, like the end-Cambrian extinction that killed off 90 percent of Earth’s species, or the Cretaceous-Tertiary catastrophe that wiped out the dinosaurs? It is a scenario that many biologists have reason to fear, as man-made climate change wreaks havoc with natural habitats around the globe. But a great dying of financial institutions is also a scenario that we should worry about, as another man-made disaster works its way slowly and painfully through the global financial system.”

In the course of this useful if somewhat lumpy volume, Mr. Ferguson looks at the roots of the current economic meltdown, examining how, in a globalized world that uses increasingly complex financial instruments, defaults on subprime mortgages in American cities like Detroit and Memphis could unleash a fiscal tsunami that spans the planet.

But the book does not focus primarily on speculative manias and financial crises; for that, the reader is better off with two old-school classics, “Manias, Panics and Crashes” by Charles P. Kindleberger and Robert Aliber, and “Extraordinary Popular Delusions and the Madness of Crowds” by Charles Mackay. Instead Mr. Ferguson discusses such cycles of euphoria and panic within a larger historical context: he traces the evolution of credit, debt and the idea of risk management over several centuries, and as he did in an earlier book, “The Cash Nexus,” he examines the potent links between politics and economics.

Mr. Ferguson explains why money went from coinage to paper and the advantages and disadvantages of the gold standard. He argues that aging societies (like those facing a large baby-boom generation entering retirement years) have “a huge and growing need for fixed income securities, and for low inflation to ensure that the interest they pay retains its purchasing power.”

And he looks at how exotic financial innovations (like collateralized debt obligations) and wide support for adjustable rate and subprime mortgages (endorsed, he says, by proponents of wider home ownership as disparate as Alan Greenspan and President Bush) pushed the snowball of the current financial crisis.

Whereas Mr. Ferguson’s recent books “Empire” (2003) and “Colossus” (2004) were highly polemical histories promoting the virtues of British and American empire, this volume is considerably less ideological and less tendentious. No doubt Mr. Ferguson, who earlier called for the United States to export democracy and capitalism, has been chastened by the continuing war in Iraq and by the growing economic difficulties of the United States.

Noting the high savings rate of Chinese households and Chinese corporations (in sharp contrast to Americans’ penchant for living on credit), he observes that the direction of capital flow is now from East to West.

“In 2007 the United States needed to borrow around $800 billion from the rest of the world; more than $4 billion every working day,” he writes. “China, by contrast, ran a current account surplus of $262 billion, equivalent to more than a quarter of the U.S. deficit. And a remarkably large proportion of that surplus has ended up being lent to the United States. In effect, the People’s Republic China has become banker to the United States of America.”

Although “The Ascent of Money” is pockmarked by digressions (about things like the Black-Scholes model of options pricing) that many lay readers will find arcane and difficult to understand, the book as a whole is animated by Mr. Ferguson’s narrative gifts, among them his ability to discuss complex ideas in user-friendly terms.

He also has a knack for illustrating his larger hypotheses with colorful stories about people like Nathan Rothschild (the subject of one of his earlier books); the Scottish economist and gambler John Law (described as “the man who invented the stock market bubble”); and the Nobel Prize-winning economist Milton Friedman and his so-called Chicago Boys, who helped bring economic reforms to Pinochet’s Chile.

It is Mr. Ferguson’s belief that “behind each great historical phenomenon there lies a financial secret,” and much of this volume aims to explicate that argument. He writes, for instance, that the Confederacy’s lack of hard cash, as much as its lack of industrial capacity or manpower, undercut its cause. And he suggests that the Renaissance boom in art and architecture can be traced to Italian bankers’ application of Eastern and Arabic mathematics to finance.

“The Dutch Republic prevailed over the Habsburg Empire,” he argues, “because having the world’s first modern stock market was financially preferable to having the world’s biggest silver mine. The problems of the French monarchy could not be resolved without a revolution because a convicted Scots murderer had wrecked the French financial system by unleashing the first stock market bubble and bust. It was Nathan Rothschild as much as the Duke of Wellington who defeated Napoleon at Waterloo. It was financial folly, a self-destructive cycle of defaults and devaluations, that turned Argentina from the world’s sixth-richest country in the 1880s into the inflation-ridden basket case of the 1980s.”

Mr. Ferguson is fond of making Darwinian comparisons in the book, writing that “financial history is essentially the result of institutional mutation and natural selection,” and noting that “as in the natural world, the evolutionary process has been subject to big disruptions in the form of geopolitical shocks and financial crises.”

Also contributing to “the inherent instability of the financial system,” he says, are the vagaries of human behavior: “our innate inclination to veer from euphoria to despondency” and “our perennial failure to learn from history.”

“Those who put their faith in the ‘wisdom of crowds’ mean no more than that a large group of people is more likely to make a correct assessment than a small group of supposed experts,” he writes. “But that is not saying much. The old joke that ‘Macroeconomists have successfully predicted nine of the last five recessions’ is not so much a joke as a dispiriting truth about the difficulty of economic forecasting. Meanwhile, serious students of human psychology will expect as much madness as wisdom from large groups of people. A case in point must be the near-universal delusion among investors in the first half of 2007 that a major liquidity crisis could not occur.”

THE ASCENT OF MONEY

A financial history of the world.

By Niall Ferguson

442 pages. The Penguin Press. $29.95

[email protected]

The Ascent of Money: A Financial History of the World

Published by EH.NET (July 2009)

Niall Ferguson, The Ascent of Money: A Financial History of the World . New York: Penguin, 2008. v + 441 pp. $30 (hardcover), ISBN: 1594201929.

Reviewed for EH.NET by Niv Horesh, Faculty of Arts and Social Sciences, University of New South Wales.

Harvard?s Niall Ferguson is perhaps best known for his magisterial history of the House of Rothschild and, more recently, his exhortation against the risks of unbridled government borrowing and nebulous stimulus packages ostensibly designed to avert what is often termed the worst global economic crisis since the Great Depression. In the Ascent of Money he harnesses his narrative skills to offer lay readership a captivating account of global monetary history from time immemorial to the twenty-first century. The book?s release coincided with an eponymous television series that has already been broadcast in much of the English-speaking world. Both the series and the book are immensely entertaining and readily accessible, but the latter arguably makes for a more convenient platform from which academics can approach Ferguson?s many insights.

The Introduction (pp. 1-17) prepares readers for what Ferguson perceptively identifies as the core stories attending the evolution of money over the last four millennia. These are many and varied, as one would expect. He is concerned with, inter alia, the ?recurrent hostility? to financial intermediaries and religious minorities associated with them in early-modern European history; the triumph of the Dutch Republic over the Hapsburg Empire, the latter?s possession of silver mines in South America notwithstanding; the spread of paper money, fiat currency and invisible means of payment in the twentieth century; right through to the possible eclipse of American global primacy in the next two decades.

Titled ?Dreams of Avarice,? Chapter One sets course by recounting how the Incas were flabbergasted by the ?insatiable lust for gold and silver? that seemed to grip the Spanish conquistadors (p. 21). It then lays out with humor and verve the well-known story of Potos?, now a fairly sleepy town in the Bolivian Andes, which once provisioned Spain with untold amounts of silver. In the same breath, the chapter goes on to offer an overview of coinage since the seventh century BC. Notably, Ferguson sees the flow of silver from the Andes to Europe as a ?resource curse? which removed the incentives for more productive economic activity, while strengthening ?rent-seeking autocrats? in seventeenth-century Spain. Contrary to criticism of Eurocentrism often leveled at him, Ferguson carefully emphasizes here the contribution other peoples have made to modern finance: ?… economic life in the Eastern world ? in the Abassid caliphate or in Song China ? was far more advanced? at least until Fibonacci introduced Indian algebraic precepts in early thirteenth-century Italy (p. 32); these were later reified by the Medicis into double-entry bookkeeping in the Florentine republic (p. 43).

By the early seventeenth-century, European financial innovation had shifted from the Italian city-states to the Low Countries, though it was still driven by the exigencies of costly and recurrent warfare and ambitions of monopolizing trade with the East (p. 48-49). This spurt of European financial innovation had actually long ?preceded the industrial revolution,? a complex but much better-studied spate of events (p. 52). The financial and industrial revolutions then converged with the spread of joint-stock companies and proto-types of central banks in the latter half of the nineteenth century.

Subsequent chapters flesh out Ferguson?s analysis. Titled ?Of Human Bondage,? Chapter Two (pp. 65-118) explores, for example, the distinctness of the European economic trajectory, beginning with how the majority of Florentine citizenry partook of financing the Republic?s debt in the fourteenth century. In the seventeenth-century, the United Provinces of the Netherlands combined the borrowing techniques of an Italian city-state ?… with the scale of a nation-state.? The Dutch were able to finance their wars by pitching Amsterdam ?as the market for a whole range of new securities? (p. 75). The eighteenth and nineteenth centuries are characterized by Anglo-French friction, but here Ferguson sees a yawning gap between protestant Britain where public debt defaults became rarer and public debt itself increased many-fold and the powers of landed aristocracy diminished while a professional civil service became more influential ? and Catholic France where public offices were often sold to raise money, tax collection was farmed out and government bond issues lost credibility. Notably, the incremental spread of, and popular faith in, British government bonds allowed Whitehall to borrow overseas as well, much to the detriment of Napoleon?s armies. Ferguson similarly believes that (p. 97) the reluctance of European investors to buy into Confederate bonds during the American Civil War doomed the South?s endeavors. This historic lesson is invoked toward the end of the chapter when discussing, in passing, the Bush Administration?s large budget deficits.

Chapter Three (?Blowing Bubbles,? pp. 119-178) zooms in on arguably the most significant economic entity of our time: the joint-stock company. Ferguson aptly dubs it ?perhaps the single greatest Dutch invention of all.? Here, he elides earlier ? though fairly short-lived ? occurrences of comparable entities both in Europe and in pre-modern Asia. But there can be little doubt that the establishment of the Dutch VOC (1602) marked a veritable turning point, not least because it underlay the growth of the world?s first bourse. Indeed, the establishment of royally-chartered companies principally aimed at trade with Asia seems to have underpinned the rise of stock exchanges and public debt in Europe?s Northeast as a whole. The rise of public debt and publicly-listed equity was beset by frequent speculative bubbles, from which emerged a more sophisticated British credit economy.

Chapter Four (?The Return of Risk,? pp. 176-229) takes up a swag of issues from the impact of Hurricane Katrina on the U.S. psyche, through how the Great Fire of London (1666) created demand for insurance policies, to Japan?s welfare system and Milton Friedman?s mentorship of Latin American finance ministers. By comparison, Chapter Five (?Safe as Houses,? pp. 230-82) is more singularly framed around what Ferguson perceptively calls ?the passion for property? in the home-owning democracies of Anglo-Saxondom. He aptly reminds us (p. 233, 241) that as recently as the 1930s, little more than two-fifths of U.S. households owned their home compared with over 65% today, and traces back this staggering social transformation to the New Deal and the Civil Rights Movement. The expansion of home ownership was facilitated in the late 1930s by then-novel institutions like Fannie Mae, which are at the heart of the recent sub-prime meltdown. In that sense, but not in that sense only, Ferguson does a wonderful job of explaining well beyond clich?s the linkages between the Great Depression to today?s global finance crisis. He then points the finger (p. 269) at rating agencies such as Moody?s and Standard & Poor?s for obfuscating the precariousness of collateralized sub-prime mortgages, which financial ?alchemists? turned into tradable debt obligations.

In essence, the last chapter (?From Empire to Chimerica,? pp. 283-340) is dedicated to China?s resurgence in the twenty-first century, and subtly considers whether this might ultimately result in a catastrophic Sino-American military confrontation. From a China specialist?s perspective, it is perhaps a pity that a scholar of Ferguson?s wisdom and insight stops short of opining whether we are witnessing at present the rise of a new form of capitalism with Chinese characteristics (e.g. capitalism without democracy) or simply gradual Chinese adaptation to Western market norms. Academic pedants might also quip that Ferguson draws heavily on Kenneth Pomeranz?s path-breaking book, The Great Divergence , when writing that living standards in Europe and China were on par as late as the eighteenth-century (p. 285). This might have called for a more detailed discussion, given that earlier parts of the book allude to the Italian city-states (fourteenth century) as the progenitors of Europe?s financial revolution. Similarly, Ferguson?s assertion that the ?… ease with which the [Chinese] Empire could finance its deficits by printing money discouraged the emergence of European-style capital markets? (p. 286) might sound a little facile to specialists, not least because note issuance was all but abandoned by late-Imperial dynasties.

However, these are minor criticisms that do not detract in any way from the wonderful feat of storytelling which Ferguson has again pulled off. This book makes for a bold and original attempt to provide a comprehensive history of what, some say, makes the world go around. It is likely to turn into a best-selling classic, and a must-read item in countless undergraduate courses.

Niv Horesh is Lecturer in Chinese Studies at the School of Languages and Linguistics, University of New South Wales, Sydney, Australia. His first book, Shanghai’s Bund and Beyond (Yale University Press, 2009), is the first comparative study in English of foreign banks and banknote issuance in pre-war China. His second book (forthcoming in 2010), is a comprehensive socio-economic account of Shanghai?s rise to prominence (1842-2010).

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The Ascent of Money: A Financial History of the World: 10th Anniversary Edition Paperback – Illustrated, Oct. 27 2009

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• Print length 496 pages
• Language English
• Publisher Penguin Books
• Publication date Oct. 27 2009
• Dimensions 13.82 x 2.77 x 21.41 cm
• ISBN-10 0143116177
• ISBN-13 978-0143116172
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• Publisher ‏ : ‎ Penguin Books; Illustrated edition (Oct. 27 2009)
• Language ‏ : ‎ English
• Paperback ‏ : ‎ 496 pages
• ISBN-10 ‏ : ‎ 0143116177
• ISBN-13 ‏ : ‎ 978-0143116172
• Item weight ‏ : ‎ 408 g
• Dimensions ‏ : ‎ 13.82 x 2.77 x 21.41 cm
• #69 in Financial Economic History
• #69 in Economic History (Books)
• #263 in Social History (Books)

About the author

Niall ferguson.

Niall Ferguson is a senior fellow at the Hoover Institution at Stanford University, former Laurence A. Tisch Professor of History at Harvard University and current senior fellow at the Center for European Studies at Harvard University, a visiting professor at Tsinghua University, Beijing, and founder and managing director of advisory firm Greenmantle LLC. The author of 15 books, Ferguson is writing a life of Henry Kissinger, the first volume of which—Kissinger, 1923-1968: The Idealist—was published in 2015 to critical acclaim. The World's Banker: The History of the House of Rothschild won the Wadsworth Prize for Business History. Other titles include Civilization: The West and the Rest, The Great Degeneration: How Institutions Decay and Economies Die and High Financier: The Lives and Time of Siegmund Warburg. Ferguson's six-part PBS television series, "The Ascent of Money: A Financial History of the World," based on his best-seller, won an International Emmy for best documentary in 2009. Civilization was also made into a documentary series. Ferguson is a recipient of the Benjamin Franklin Award for Public Service as well as other honors. His most recent book is The Square and the Tower: Networks on Power from the Freemasons to Facebook (2018).

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Hurrah for hedge funds

N iall Ferguson has written a brilliant book exploring the historic nexus between money, diplomacy, warfare and globalisation. It's called The House of Rothschild: The World's Banker 1849-1998. His new work, The Ascent of Money, written 10 years later, is an altogether different beast.

From its opening sentence - 'Bread, cash, dosh, dough, loot, lucre, moolah, readies, the wherewithal: call it what you like, money matters' - you know this is a TV tie-in. But books and television scripts are not the same. This truth was best acknowledged by a TV book on the same subject as Ferguson's series. 'A book is a book and a television series is a set of television programmes,' wrote Peter Jay in Road to Riches. 'Both have their own demanding disciplines and imperatives; and neither can be made successfully as an image of the other.' While TV glories in the concrete and struggles with the abstract, written history can embrace both. As Jay explains: 'A book may make more demands on its reader and, in return, the reader may expect more matter from the author.' It is not a deal on which Ferguson delivers.

The Ascent of Money is an account of 'moolah' from the Incas to the credit crunch and, with it, an argument for the centrality of finance to all elements of human history. With typical bravado, the thesis is modelled on Jacob Bronowski's masterful series, The Ascent of Man, with Ferguson positioning financial markets as 'the mirror of mankind', magnifying back to us our values, weaknesses and psychoses. 'Money amplifies our tendency to overreact, to swing from exuberance when things are going well to deep depression when they go wrong. Booms and busts are products of our emotional volatility.' And, barring the odd fluctuation, finance has, like Man, in Ferguson's account at least, ascended in good, Whiggish fashion 'unquestionably upwards'. It is a story of relentless progress that might not be wholly obvious to today's HBOS shareholders and Icelandic bank savers.

This virtuous journey is presented to the reader in a barely concealed TV-script format, with all the tropes that discipline demands: the notion of secret discovery ('Behind every great historical phenomenon there lies a financial secret'); the importance of journey ('Read this book and you will understand why... '); the ever shorter, more emphatic sentences and the need for visual scene-setting. There is also a curious, irksome desire to refract the past through the personal: Ferguson's upbringing in Glasgow, his Calvinist heritage and early love of westerns all pepper the narrative.

Such solipsism helps to crowd out the history as we hurtle through the role of money in Roman society, the undoing of the Hapsburg Empire thanks to New World inflation, Shylock and Venice, Florence and the Medici, and the finance bubbles of the 18th century. Inevitably, there are omissions and oversights: the story of social insurance fails to mention the schemes of Thomas Paine and Richard Price to alleviate poverty in the 18th century; finance and the Industrial Revolution receives a single sentence, while Ferguson's account of the 1860s cotton famine relies on fairly old scholarship.

Worse than that is the lack of interest in the intellectual history of capital. George Soros gets more attention than Adam Smith and at a time when we are facing what Eric Hobsbawm has called 'the greatest crisis of capitalism since the 1930s', with Das Kapital a bestseller in Germany, is it credible to devote more space to Goldman Sachs's Jim O'Neill than the works of Karl Marx?

However, when we reach the 19th century, Ferguson's powers are on formidable display. His critique of British imperial hegemony and Edwardian globalisation, and his explanation of the role of bond markets in 1930s German hyperinflation, mix financial, diplomatic and economic history with the fluency and clarity that only Ferguson is capable of. Alone among modern economic historians, he is able to present complex data in a consistently revelatory manner.

The story he tells starkly underlines the ever-growing global dependence on an ever-more complex financial architecture. In 2000, there were 3,873 hedge funds with $490bn in assets. In the first quarter of 2008, there were 7,601 funds with $1.9 trillion in assets. The ins and outs of the Medici family are all very well, but Ferguson the Financial Times pundit is clearly bored by it and wants to move on swiftly to collateral debt obligations, sub-prime mortgages and the alchemy of longing and shorting. He is slavish in his devotion towards modern capital, its ever more innovative mutations and the masters of the universe who send it spiralling around the world. 'Ken Griffin loves risk,' begins a particularly oleaginous account of a hedge funder. 'Among the artworks that decorate his penthouse apartment on North Michigan Avenue is Jasper Johns's False Start, for which he paid $80m and a Cézanne which cost him $60m.'

Ferguson will also brook no criticism of the international organs of finance and their 'Washington Consensus'. As far as he's concerned, the IMF was blameless in its response to the Asian financial crisis of the mid-1990s (which many regard as the nadir of neoliberal policy making), Pinochet saved Chilean democracy by following Milton Friedman's monetarist orthodoxy, while Robert Zoellick of the World Bank quickly metamorphoses into the familiar 'Bob.' The anti-globalisation critiques of Naomi Klein, Joseph Stiglitz and Paul Krugman are clearly in his sights, but Ferguson uncharacteristically pulls his punches in this mostly anodyne text.

Instead of an inquiring history, what we are left with is a reverential panorama of neoliberal capitalism. Above all, there is little investigation of the losers in the zero-sum game of money's ascent. The only possible cloud Ferguson spies on the future horizon of finance is democratic accountability, with its 'rules and regulations [that] can make previously good traits suddenly disadvantageous'. Quite where the Bear Stearns bail out and bank nationalisation fit into the picture is unclear.

Indeed, much of this book has been overtaken by history and Ferguson looks like being left stranded as the last great hagiographer of hedge funds. As a trailer for the forthcoming TV series (which starts on Channel 4 on 17 November), his bullish stance works well enough, though I would recommend only watching the Panglossian Ferguson, and reading the more considered Jay. Books and television can complement each other - just not always by the same author.

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Book summary and reviews of The Ascent of Money by Niall Ferguson

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The Ascent of Money

A Financial History of the World

by Niall Ferguson

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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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"Ferguson's reputation is so high that if he were a stock one would short him. The very title of his book, The Ascent of Money , is a screaming sell signal, like the shoe-shine boys trading stock tips at the door to Grand Central Station in New York in 1929. In fairness, Ferguson recognises that and his pages are hot with proof-stage tyre-marks, as he goes into violent reverse to escape from under collapsing arguments. None the less, his book is very readable indeed and the television series for which it is a sort of trailer, will, I am sure, be even better." - The Guardian (UK). "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." - The Economist. "Ferguson's lighthearted but thoughtful stroll through financial history is a welcome and recommended addition for public libraries and undergraduate collections." - Library Journal.

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Niall Ferguson Author Biography

Niall Ferguson, MA, D.Phil., is Laurence A. Tisch Professor of History at Harvard University. He is also a Senior Fellow at the Hoover Institution, Stanford University, and a Senior Research Fellow at Jesus College, Oxford. Born in Glasgow in 1964, he graduated with First Class Honors from Magdalen College, Oxford. His books include Paper and Iron: Hamburg Business and German Politics in the Era of Inflation 1897-1927 , The Pity of War: Explaining World War One , The World's Banker: The History of the House of Rothschild , High Financier: The Lives and Time of Siegmund Warburg , The Great Degeneration and Henry Kissinger: A Life . He won the Wadsworth Prize for Business History and was also short-listed for the Jewish Quarterly/Wingate Literary Award and the American National Jewish Book ...

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Name Pronunciation Niall Ferguson: Can be pronounced Nigh-al or Neil depending on country of origin. The author pronounces his name Neil

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The Ascent of Money Essay (Movie Review)

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In his introduction, Ferguson attempts to attract the interest of the audience by eliciting the people’s feelings towards the current monetary system. The author uses the terms used to describe money in various societies such as “bread, moolah, dough, dosh, cash and readies” to attract the attention of the reader. He also mentions the modern perceptions and believes about money. For instance, Christians believe that money is the backbone of all evils while leaders believe it is the sign of might, wealth and respect.

Having attracted the interest of the reader, the author now turns to express the idea of his book. He brings forth the questions that the book attempts to answer. For instance, what is money? How has money developed from mere tablets and metals to printed-paper? How will money become invisible yet usable? What is the origin of money and how did it evolve? Finally, he tends to determine the future of money.

The book uses review of literature as the main study method. In fact, Fergusson has made an in-depth analysis of the historical records to determine the origin, evolution and development of the world monetary systems. The author goes beyond the common history and looks at the economic forces behind every historical development since the Mesopotamian and Egyptian civilizations. According to the author “every historical event has a financial secret”.

For instance, the Italian Renaissance is attributed with changes in science, arts, music, education and other aspects of life. However, Fergusson says that a major financial secret contributed to the renaissance.

According to the book, major changes in during the Renaissance were under the control of individuals who converted these changes to money and wealth, including Da Vinci and the Medici families. In addition, case studies based on historical evidence as well as modern examples of monetary evolution have been used in-depth.

According to the author, the financial crisis that was affecting most parts of the world between 2007 and 2008 was an important sign of the continuing development and evolution of the monetary system.

Ferguson reviews the situation facing the global financial system. According to the book, the increase in the cost of living, average income per individual, price surges, inflations and deflations and the GDP in general have changed since 1990, especially in the US. However, the author tends to argue that this change is not a unique phenomenon but rather, it is a continuing change that has been taking place in the evolution of money.

In addition, the author associates the control of the world financial system as a continuing part of the evolution of money. For instance, he mentions the work of banks, billionaires, capitalists and other parties that control the world financial system. He tells the reader not to worry because this trend has been there since the ancient times, but has been evolving alongside the evolution of technology and other aspects of humans.

The book provides an in-depth analysis of the historical materials from the ancient civilizations in Mesopotamia and Egypt. Clay tablets have been found, which provide evidence that money was the most important measures of wealth and part of trade. Ferguson argues that these clay tablets provide evidence that the need for writing was not to tell history, but to conduct trade.

The author reviews some of the records that indicate how the ancient civilizations used metals such as silver rings, blocks and sheets were used in exchange of good such as wool, barley, cotton and animals. He gives the example of a silver sheet of metal used as money in Sippar during the reign of King Ammi-Diatana between 1683 and 1646 BC.

The evolution of baking system came along with the evolution of money. According to Ferguson, banking system started with shylock. The purpose of shylocks was to accumulate wealth at the expense of the weaknesses of the poor and unorganized individuals in the society.

For instance, the Medici Family of Italy is cited as the most important example of early shylocks that acted as lenders and bankers. Although there were no legal systems to control these individuals, they contributed to the development of the modern banking systems. Nevertheless, they were primarily thieves because they exploited their clients.

The earliest form of a bank existed in Netherlands in the 1th century. Known as the Duthc Wisslebank, the bank allowed individuals to save their money and borrow loans for a given period. However, Lanebank, a Swiss institution, was the first model of a real bank. Apart from allowing people to save and borrow money, it also facilitated trade and commercial payments. Thus, Ferguson says that it is the pioneer banking system in the history of humans.

The banking system in Europe developed rapidly between 15 th and 17 th centuries. This period saw the evolution of banking as more and more institutions copied the model of the Swiss Lanebank. In Britain, the monarch was actively involved in the process. In addition, mathematicians such as Isaac Newton were actually bankers and financial enthusiasts whose work helped in developing exchange systems.

However, the author argues that these development systems brought a number of negative effects on the society. For instance, the evolution and development of banking system brought a new term- Bankruptcy. The term became a common reference to a state of being unable to pay debts because one could not accumulate money needed to settle financial dues. According to the author, this would otherwise be possible if the ancient barter trade or hunting and gathering systems survived.

The evolution of money and the emergence of the state of bankruptcy brought other important aspects on the societies. Ferguson argues that as money became the most importance force controlling every aspect of life, humans became tied to the system, creating human bondage.

One could not do anything without involving money and the financial system. The emergence of banks came along with the emergence of groups and individuals that controlled the financial systems, which aimed at accumulating wealth in expense of the state of poverty. Aspects of inflation, deflation, economic crisis and credit crunch emerged, which dominated most financial systems in Europe and the world in general because people were tightly tied to money.

In conclusion, the author attempts to predict the future of money. With the increasing rate of using non-liquid cash, the future of solid money is complicated. Ferguson says that this trend will cause a new phenomenon known as “the descent of money” , which will involved removal of printed papers and coins from the market and retain money in terms of figures that will be the measure of wealth.

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IvyPanda. (2019, February 7). The Ascent of Money. https://ivypanda.com/essays/the-ascent-of-money-a-book-review/

"The Ascent of Money." IvyPanda , 7 Feb. 2019, ivypanda.com/essays/the-ascent-of-money-a-book-review/.

IvyPanda . (2019) 'The Ascent of Money'. 7 February.

IvyPanda . 2019. "The Ascent of Money." February 7, 2019. https://ivypanda.com/essays/the-ascent-of-money-a-book-review/.

1. IvyPanda . "The Ascent of Money." February 7, 2019. https://ivypanda.com/essays/the-ascent-of-money-a-book-review/.

Bibliography

IvyPanda . "The Ascent of Money." February 7, 2019. https://ivypanda.com/essays/the-ascent-of-money-a-book-review/.

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• ISBN-10 0143116177
• ISBN-13 978-0143116172
• Edition 1st
• Publisher Penguin Books
• Publication date 1 January 1900
• Language English
• Dimensions 13.82 x 2.77 x 21.41 cm
• Print length 496 pages
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• Publisher ‏ : ‎ Penguin Books; 1st edition (1 January 1900)
• Language ‏ : ‎ English
• Paperback ‏ : ‎ 496 pages
• ISBN-10 ‏ : ‎ 0143116177
• ISBN-13 ‏ : ‎ 978-0143116172
• Reading age ‏ : ‎ 18 years and up
• Item Weight ‏ : ‎ 408 g
• Dimensions ‏ : ‎ 13.82 x 2.77 x 21.41 cm
• Country of Origin ‏ : ‎ India
• #1,216 in Economic History (Books)
• #4,985 in World History (Books)

About the author

Niall ferguson.

Niall Ferguson is a senior fellow at the Hoover Institution at Stanford University, former Laurence A. Tisch Professor of History at Harvard University and current senior fellow at the Center for European Studies at Harvard University, a visiting professor at Tsinghua University, Beijing, and founder and managing director of advisory firm Greenmantle LLC. The author of 15 books, Ferguson is writing a life of Henry Kissinger, the first volume of which—Kissinger, 1923-1968: The Idealist—was published in 2015 to critical acclaim. The World's Banker: The History of the House of Rothschild won the Wadsworth Prize for Business History. Other titles include Civilization: The West and the Rest, The Great Degeneration: How Institutions Decay and Economies Die and High Financier: The Lives and Time of Siegmund Warburg. Ferguson's six-part PBS television series, "The Ascent of Money: A Financial History of the World," based on his best-seller, won an International Emmy for best documentary in 2009. Civilization was also made into a documentary series. Ferguson is a recipient of the Benjamin Franklin Award for Public Service as well as other honors. His most recent book is The Square and the Tower: Networks on Power from the Freemasons to Facebook (2018).

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Customers find the book's research excellent and fascinating. They also describe the writing style as lucid, great for the layman, and shorn of jargon. Readers also say the book provides an enthralling account of money.

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Customers find the book well researched, interesting, and great for the layman. They also say it provides great insights into money and capitalism.

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Customers find the writing style extremely well written, understandable, and excellently put forth. They also say it's great for the layman, lucid, and shorn of jargon. Customers appreciate the quality of the book material and the pictures are crisp and vivid.

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"...Lucid in style and shorn of jargon , this is an enthraling account of money." Read more

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