The ascent of money : a financial history of the world / Niall Ferguson.

Enhanced descriptions from Syndetics:

Watch the PBS program based on The Ascent of Money .

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, 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.

Reviews provided by Syndetics

Library Journal Review

How money made us. Catch this book by the busy Harvard/Oxford/Hoover Institute luminary before the PBS special airs in 2009. (c) Copyright 2010. Library Journals LLC, a wholly owned subsidiary of Media Source, Inc. No redistribution permitted.

CHOICE Review

This is a work of extraordinary breadth of scholarship and penetrating judgments, and there is nothing that equals it. Ferguson (Harvard Univ.; Oxford Univ., UK) provides expansive coverage of the birth of debt, banking, bankruptcies, and people's repeated indulgence in them. Written in a graceful, flowing style, this book is a judicious blend of elegantly simplified economic theory and history. This reviewer concurs with the author's verdict that the theory of economics and finance is consummate in mathematics but devoid of history and consequently lacks a touch with reality. Anyone who wants to understand financial history traversing through institutional mutation and natural selection will be enlightened by reading this work. Books are written to be read, but Ferguson's book is written to be read, reread, and savored. Summing Up: Essential. All levels. C. J. Talele Columbia State Community College

Booklist Review

British historian Ferguson follows Empire (2003), his provocative take on British history, and his equally provocative take on the American empire in Colossus (2004), with a not so much provocative as fresh look at the history of money and its ramifications on how modern life has evolved, since to him money is the root of most progress. One of his basic premises cannot be argued with: most people in the English-speaking world are woefully ignorant of things financial. To that end, Ferguson, in his desire to educate the general public, presents the history of money within these contexts: the rise of money and the history of credit, and the histories of the bond market, the stock market, insurance, the real-estate market, and international finance. There is an ease to his prose that leaves this complicated subject interesting to and approachable by any general reader. For the history and social-science side of the public library business collection.--Hooper, Brad Copyright 2008 Booklist

Kirkus Book Review

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 suggestscontra 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 mortgagesthe 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. A useful introduction to the world of drachmas, dinars and dollars. Copyright Kirkus Reviews, used with permission.