A great read!
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a great read for anyone in the financial services industry or with an interest in history.
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If Harvard leadership amounts to this much we deserve it all and much more to come
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Ferguson comes up again as an unabashed defender of empire(s), especially those espousing financial capitalism as modus operandi. So much so that he touches revisionist overtones at times.
Had this been just a history book, however partial, Ascent of Money would have been only half bad. However, Ferguson's ideological positions only add insult to the periodic injury produced by financial capitalism.
Staying with history for a while, the book makes for a quick traversal of modern financial instruments and some of the supporting institutions and ideologies. Assuming the role of historian of finance, Ferguson doesn't seem to worry about proving anything; a narrative from the perspective of the victors, in (t)his case, the Anglo-Saxon financial elites, might do just as well. One comes away with the idea that financial capitalism is better, necessary, and almost always self-sufficient. Moreover, the welfare state should be viewed not only as a half-baked idea of capitalists, but also past its due date by now.
Here are few examples of missing pieces from Ferguson's take one the rise of financial capitalism: Nowhere is the goal of financial capitalism explicitly stated. I would posit that financial markets are supposed to help/guide us to do the best resource allocation (read, optimal) with the idea of maximizing social welfare. The "us" above is the state and voting citizenry, and not the financial elites alone. Without any compass at work, it's easy for the author to ignore the societal costs of financial capitalism--in the UK/US case, the disappearance of production followed by de-professionalization, and misallocation of resources during, and in the aftermath of, bubbles. In other words, if we look only at what financial capitalism creates, in isolation from other countries or its own side effects, Ferguson's book is right on the money. Otherwise, the market as compass is just as accurate as communism.
Ferguson doesn't seem to make much of his own statistics on how much more we spend on, let's say, healthcare and education for much lower returns. In fact, Schumpeter himself, one of the apostles of capitalism, once said that one of our problems in the US was the professional quality, or lack thereof, of our government employees. Hmm, could this have anything to do with how financial capitalism allocates human resources and/or how a society worships the high priests of finance?
In any case, fear not the current crisis, for Ferguson has embarked into the next expedition of financial capitalism as charted by the Harvard behavioral finance-, and MIT's Andrew Lo's financial evolutionist/adaptive markets-hypotheses. He does so by means of the last chapter in the book, a veritable illustration of plus ça change, plus c'est la même chose. In plain English, it's just the tools and possibly the actors that needed change, provided that the masters, ideology and the fools remain the same.
Rating this book is not easy. It should take 4 stars for the historic part, 2 stars for ideology, and 0 stars for partiality. All in all, for a 2-star book the interested reader may do better to borrow. And, yes, it reads fast and there is plenty of detail surrounded by historical context that make Ascent of Money a decent read.
Nota Bene: Why is it that, in this book, Niall Ferguson writes so dismissively about George Soros' ideas on financial markets reflexivity? Soros has built his fortune also by leveraging the reflexivity he recommends be tamed by adequate understanding and regulation of the financial markets. Unfortunately, Ascent of Money contributes only partially to that understating, and reads little about financial markets regulation.
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A swashbuckling tale of... Economics!
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This is an exciting book of adventure and international historical intrigue that kept me reading into the night! I'm serious... and I'm an artist, not a business woman. Ferguson did an excellent job of intertwining our current economic crisis with the financial histories he chose to include in his book. It made his subject more relevant, and unfortunately, more perilous.
As a non-business person I learned so much about financial history and contemporary economics, all in an entertaining format. "The Ascent of Money" is must-reading for these times.
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History Speaks for Itself
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As Ferguson points out so clearly in his latest book, "Ascent of Money", money and its propagation have become the chief driving forces of modern history. Like it or not, society's love affair with money has driven it to devise all kinds of ingenious means for expanding its power to produce more. This study looks at a number of fascinating scenarios where the Medicis, the Rothschilds, the Bank of England, the Paris stock exchange, the insurance industry and Wall Street have all done their bit to raise the historical significance of hard cash to a stratospheric level where it is no longer just a tangible piece of paper but is now a universal abstraction called credit. At the heart of the matter is the individual and corporate need to generate economic growth by creating monetary opportunity. Money only circulates effectively in society if people can trust its value as a medium of exchange for goods and services. If production falters, as it is presently, money can quickly devalue. Ferguson goes well beyond looking at the conventional realms of money as a basic specie to analyzing the inflated world of credit instruments such as bonds, debentures, bills of exchange, stocks, swaps, derivatives, mortgages, and credit cards. While money has expanded to include a variety of uses which have encouraged western civilization to modernize in leaps and bounds, it has come with a terrible price: failure to know when to exercise restraint and moderation in the rush to get rich quickly. It is this excessive behaviour in war, peace, and prosperity that compels many to take incredible risks with their own money and that borrowed from traditional sources like banks. Offsetting every optimistic prospect of making money is the ever-present fear that it could be just as easily lost. We have now reached a point in history where the expected and projected big growth of the past decades is slowly being replaced by a long-term forecast of lower and even negative growth due to our inability to keep ahead of the investment curve. The traditional power and lure of money may no longer be able to sustain our personal and collective drive to make and keep wealth. Ferguson is one of those big picture historians who fills his writing with lots of interesting stories to make his point. Very informative read!
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Money Makes the World Go Round
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The latest book by Harvard professor and popular commentator Niall Ferguson is a historical look at the rise of finance. Ever wonder how the stock market came to be? Exactly how and why did the evolution of credit lead to the rise of civilizations? Could all the world's conflicts be explained by economics? These are the historical questions Ferguson poses and attempts to answer in "The Ascent of Money."
Ferguson's primary purpose for the book is by using economic history to help explain the complexities of modern financial institutions. Why, might you ask is this important? Because the average person knows little to nothing about such simple financial facts such as the interest rate charged by their credit card. Never before, in this globalized, highly coupled world that we live in today, has financial knowledge and a fundamental understanding of financial institutions been more important than it is today. Everyone is affected by world markets, interest rates, and inflation one way or another.
Some reviewers have critiqued the book for its lack of historical breadth, and to some extent I would agree. However, the book is already 350+ pages, and more historical examples would dilute Ferguson's arguments. As ambitious as it is to try to explain such a complicated subject, Ferguson is mostly on the mark. I highly recommend this book for anyone who wants to know more about the history of finance.
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