The Ascent of Money by Niall Ferguson

The Ascent of Money by Niall Ferguson

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.

Ferguson, Niall: - Niall Ferguson is the Laurence A. Tisch Professor of History at Harvard University; the William Ziegler Professor of Business Administration at Harvard Business School; a senior research fellow of Jesus College, Oxford; and a senior fellow of the Hoover Institution, Stanford. The bestselling author of Paper and Iron, The House of Rothschild, The Pity of War, The Cash Nexus, Empire, Colossus, and The War of the World, he is also a contributing editor of the Financial Times. Since 2003, he has written and presented three highly successful television documentary series for British television: Empire, American Colossus, and, most recently, The War of the World. He and his family divide their time between the United Kingdom and the United States.

SKU	Unavailable
ISBN 13	9781410415332
ISBN 10	1410415333
Title	The Ascent of Money
Author	Niall Ferguson
Series	Thorndike Nonfiction
Condition	Unavailable
Binding Type	Hardback
Publisher	Thorndike Press
Year published	2009-05-01
Number of pages	647
Cover note	Book picture is for illustrative purposes only, actual binding, cover or edition may vary.