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The Ascent of Money: A Financial History of the World | 
| Author: Niall Ferguson
Publisher: Penguin Press HC, The
Category: Book
List Price: $29.95
Buy New: $17.61
You Save: $12.34 (41%)
Rating:  37 reviews
Sales Rank: 81
Media: Hardcover
Number Of Items: 1
Pages: 432
Shipping Weight (lbs): 1.6
Dimensions (in): 9.1 x 6.3 x 1.6
ISBN: 1594201927
Dewey Decimal Number: 332.09
EAN: 9781594201929
Publication Date: November 13, 2008
Availability: Usually ships in 24 hours
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Product Description
Niall Ferguson follows the money to tell the human story behind the evolution of finance, from its origins in ancient Mesopotamia to the latest upheavals on what he calls Planet Finance.
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, its the sinews of war. To revolutionaries, its the chains of labor. But in The Ascent of Money, Niall Ferguson shows that finance is in fact the foundation of human progress. Whats more, he reveals financial history as the essential backstory behind all history.
Through Fergusons 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 worlds 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? Whats 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 cant 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 worlds biggest countries, India and China, from poverty to wealth in the space of a single generationan economic transformation unprecedented in human history.
Yet the central lesson of the financial history is that sooner or later every bubble burstssooner or later the bearish sellers outnumber the bullish buyers, sooner or later greed flips into fear. And thats why, whether youre scraping by or rolling in it, theres never been a better time to understand the ascent of money.
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| Customer Reviews: Read 32 more reviews...
 Money makes the world go round November 20, 2008
95 out of 103 found this review helpful
If you are like me, the recent financial crisis has forced you to rethink what money is, how it works, and how global economic trends affect when and how currency moves about. This timely book explains the origin and growth of money, banks, stock markets.
Ferguson shows us that the typical Wall Street logic of looking back the twenty or thirty years only the most experienced investors lived through is not enough to improve our current position. Ferguson says the only way to solve our financial crisis is to put the origin of money and financial strain in its proper historical context. It is far too late to be discussing expensive houses and cheap credit. We need to look way way back to understand the wreckage of banks, brokers and hedge funds that litters the markets. He shows us that looking back is the way to know what to do next. Otherwise, it'll be another new bubble down the road that leaves us scratching our heads after it pops.
Read Ferguson's book and you'll better understand the possibilities for disaster inherent in the loose credit and securitization of bad debt from which so much money was made before the crisis unfolded. His grasp of history vindicates his profession and brings an understated beauty to money.
The other book I read this week that I also recommend very strongly is The Emotional Intelligence Quick Book. Let's just say it makes it a little easier for me to watch the market, and in a little better mood around my husband when I come home from work :)
The Financial Subplot November 15, 2008
81 out of 106 found this review helpful
Niall Ferguson has written an easily accessible and very entertaining history of finance, ranging from the clay tokens of Mesopotamia 5,000 years ago to the hedge funds of today. The title of this book has apparently been modelled on Jacob Bronowski's "The Ascent of Man," and like that book it will be made into a television series. Being a television celebrity is not something that wins the admiration of one's peers in the history profession, to say the least. But those little rebukes are relatively mild compared to the scorn he received for his political views in Empire: The Rise and Demise of the British World Order and the Lessons for Global Power and Colossus: The Rise and Fall of the American Empire. In those works he argued that empire was beneficial not only to the mother country but the dominated countries as well. In this work he chronicles not only the history of money but also makes a case for liberalized finance.
Ferguson examines the financial subplot behind some of the major historical powers such as the role of money in ancient Mesopotamia, the denarius in Roman society, and gold and silver in the civilization of the Incas. He is very good in his descriptions of financial families like the Medicis and the Rothchilds, and how they became banking dynasties. Another memorable episode was the rise of Amsterdam as the world's financial center and the center's subsequent shift to London.
History is also filled with financial disasters of which we are well aware today. Ferguson tells the story of John Law and how he became France's head of finance. He engineered a financial bubble that took them several generations to overcome. Making matters worse, it occurred at the same time as the British South Sea Bubble.
Also instructive is the history of the first great globalization (1870-1914). (For this period also read Jeffrey Frieden's Global Capitalism: Its Fall and Rise in the Twentieth Century.) The world had become so economically interdependent that the pundits believed the possibility of war between great powers had been eliminated. This sentiment was famously expressed in "The Great Illusion" by Norman Angell.
Although this book was written before the current economic crisis, the last chapter is very prescient. "From Empire to Chimerica" tells of the symbiotic relationship between China and America. The combined country "accounts for just over a 10th of the world's land surface, a quarter of its population, and a third of its economic output, and more than half of the global economic growth of the last eight years". This relationship, in which China saves and America spends, and in which China's savings is used to enable America to spend even more, is clearly unsustainable. Ferguson sees this savings glut as the cause of the current subprime crisis. That, in my humble opinion, was one of the causes; there were many bad actors involved in this catastrophe, citizen-borrowers included.
Although it is not obvious to everyone in the midst of a crisis, Ferguson correctly points out that financial engineering is one of the great forces behind human progress. The history of finance is a process of creative destruction. Financial risk-taking is necessary for economic expansion and human development, and Ferguson does a good job in making the case. Too bad it reads like a script made for the History Channel.
 Readable and engaging November 14, 2008
75 out of 98 found this review helpful
Historian Niall Ferguson teaches economic history at Harvard so he certainly has credentials for a book like this. While his historical knowledge is impressive his financial claims can seem a bit cavalier and broad-sweeping.
Ferguson celebrates financiers as the source of modern wealth and prosperity. He backs up his claim by a historical examination of the last 500 years. This includes the Italians in the late Middle Ages, as well as the Dutch in the 17th century and Britain's empire success which he partially attributes to the establishment of the Bank of England in 1694.
After setting the historical context Ferguson becomes a pundit on the current global situation. Commenting on those who speculate in the financial markets today Ferguson writes, "When people have a run of luck, they very quickly impute this to their own brilliance. Once you start interpreting your good fortune as your skill, you're very quickly a master of the universe who can never fall. That, of course, is precisely when you fall." He likens financiers to gamblers, which may not be a completely fair connection. Of course there is risk involved in investing, but the primary concern in the financial world is how to limit that risk, react wisely, and be patient.
As Ferguson considers the financial crises his assessment is neither overly positive nor calamitous. "Before this crisis," Ferguson says, "there were people who thought there would never be another recession--that kind of crazy, myopic, unhistorical belief. That was followed in the last month or so by wild panic, as if it's the end of the world."
Ferguson states the obvious when he declares we will all be affected by the current financial mess, and that it will take a while for the market to correct itself.
In short, if you like history more than finance, this is going to be an enjoyable book for you. However, if it's the other way around the details might be suffocating.
 Erudite hodgepodge December 5, 2008
69 out of 87 found this review helpful
When I saw the interview with Niall Ferguson on CNN, I thought that I would get an insightful book that would enable me to understand and navigate the current economic crisis. After all, Ferguson is a Harvard professor (thus he is superbly credentialed), and the interview suggested that he had the foresight of the coming events.
Yet the book turned out to be an utter disappointment. On the surface, the book seems to have a good structure. The chapters logically follow a sequence: the history of money, credit, bonds, stocks, insurance, real estate, globalization, hedge funds, computer models of investing, and behavioral finance. The text is easy to read and crafty. However, the chapters fall short on several accounts. The chapters present selected events in the history of their respective subject rather than a broad overview. I did not expect a comprehensive history, but the selection was minimalist, often skewed, and the events were more often than not presented in a disjointed manner. There was some semblance of logic tying them together, but one had to know way more than the average reader to see the connection. If the reader had that kind of knowledge, the book did not offer much. Without the knowledge, the book's logic was lacking and, indeed, contained gaps and jumps.
Even before I reached the end of the book, I developed the feeling that the Author's pretty shameless primary goal was to write a book that can sell many copies, and make money. It is a quickly assembled patchwork that, in spite of the polished writing, is mostly useless fluff. There are much better books on the subject that will explain the concept of money and the current economic crisis. (Just an example: Robert Prechter's Conquer The Crash, published in 2002.) Since the interview on CNN, I heard additional interviews with Niall Ferguson (e.g., on NPR). The timing of the publication and the marketing efforts are way superior to the qualities of the book.
If you can borrow this book from someone, you will only waste some time by reading it, but at least you will save your money. This book is certainly not worth having on your shelf - in the long run it will only collect dust, and you will not open it again. Probably you would be better off not reading it at all (there are better alternatives). The knowledge you will gain is most likely not proportionate with the time invested (wasted) in the reading. The two stars I gave might be a little too generous, especially considering that one expects a much better book from a Harvard professor. However, I have to give credit for the style and a modicum of usefulness.
Who says the financial world is confusing and bewildering? November 20, 2008
34 out of 44 found this review helpful
I'm not sure when Niall Ferguson finds time to sleep...
Fresh from a series of lively, accessible histories focusing on geopolitics -- the concept of empires, warfare, etcetera -- Ferguson, far from taking a well-earned rest, has tackled the toughest topic of all: the history of the global financial system. The author of other books on finance-related topics (The Cash Nexus: Money and Power in the Modern World, 1700-2000and The House of Rothschild, the World's Banker 1849-1999), the author may seem to have returned to his roots. In fact, as his book makes clear, understanding how money and finance works can explain a lot about human nature and thus about our social and political institutions. Understand what money is, how it is made, invested and transfered, and you understand issues like equality, political instability and economic progress. After all, as he recounts, great fortunes were made by those willing to take risky financial bets on the eve of the battle of Waterloo. When final word of Napoleon's defeat arrived, the seeds of the Rothschild's vast fortune were sown, and the apparently nerveless Nathan Rothschild rode his stake in British government bonds higher and higher.
Ferguson has a knack for making this material accessible, whether it's the nature of what earliest civilizations considered to be "money" to the religious dilemmas that hovered around the concept of usury. (The popes in Rome denounced interest as usury.)
Of course, in the current environment, the most compelling part of the book will be the chapters Ferguson devotes to financial bubbles and in particular to the ongoing mayhem in our global financial system. Today's Rothschilds, those who have let their bets ride and rolled the dice over and over again, have finally lost out, and Ferguson gives what some are likely to view as an overly-simplistic analysis of the causes of this. (But this simplicity is likely to be very welcome to all those on Main Street who still view Wall Street as, in Ben Bernanke's words, an "abstraction".)
The most solid part of this analysis is, not surprisingly, the historical component. Thankfully, Ferguson avoids falling into the trap of giving readers yet another look at the great tulip bubble. Instead, he launches into an analysis of what kinds of risks speculators have taken throughout history, and the various ways they have come to grief.
The final part of Ferguson's argument is perhaps the weakest, although perhaps that is only because of the book's timing -- smack in the midst of financial chaos that he couldn't have imagined when he delivered the final manuscript. His look at behavioral finance is intriguing and welcome; his analysis of the behavior of today's "money movers", such as hedge funds is too simplistic. I'll look forward to reading an updated edition at a later date.
Most provocative of all are Ferguson's final conclusions about the role of China in the global financial system. For now, at least, the concept of decoupling -- much talked of before 2008 -- seems to have fallen by the wayside; in the current bloodbath, everyone is suffering in some way. "What price a subprime superpower?" he enquires, in the context of emerging global rivals. This, too, is a story that may be better told in a few years' time, since many of the most important issues can today be framed only as questions.
This is not a book for hardcore Wall Street folks or even those with a reasonable knowledge of the way financial markets have evolved (securitization, credit derivatives, hedge funds, etc.), unless they also have a strong interest in history. There are many other, better and more detailed books to satisfy them. This work, in contrast, gives any reader a firm base of knowledge as to how and why financial systems evolved. Perhaps it may even give them comfort that as we have survived periods of extreme financial crisis, so we will -- somehow -- survive this one.
For anyone interested into delving into one particular era touched on by Niall Ferguson, I'd highly recommend the following: Medici Money: Banking, Metaphysics, and Art in Fifteenth-Century Florence (Enterprise) (Enterprise)
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