He delves into the origins of the subprime mortgage crisis. Ferguson travels to post-Katrina New Orleans to ask why the free market can’t provide adequate protection against catastrophe.
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? With the clarity and verve for which he is known, Ferguson elucidates key financial institutions and concepts by showing where they came from. And the origins of the French Revolution are traced back to a stock market bubble caused by a convicted Scot murderer. The rise of the Dutch republic is reinterpreted as the triumph of the world’s first modern bond market over insolvent Habsburg absolutism. 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.
Through Ferguson's expert lens familiar historical landmarks appear in a new and sharper financial focus. What’s more, he reveals financial history as the essential backstory behind all history. But in The Ascent of Money, Niall Ferguson shows that finance is in fact the foundation of human progress. To revolutionaries, it’s the chains of labor. To Christians, love of it is the root of all evil. 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.īread, cash, dosh, dough, loot, lucre, moolah, readies, the wherewithal: Call it what you like, it matters.
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