By Niall Ferguson
Publisher: Allen Lane – Penguin Books
ISBN – 978-1-846-14106-5
Perhaps it is unfortunate to talk about the ascent of money these days but it is exactly masterpieces like Niall Ferguson’s that you would want to read at times like these. The author, tagged as “the most brilliant British historian of his generation”, traces the history of money, credit, debt, banks and bonds from ancient times all the way to the subprime mortgage crisis of 2007 and beyond to the events in 2008.
The book is not about the current crisis and how to solve it. It is about the fascinating world of money and its equivalents and how it moved peoples, wars, institutions, how it elevated some and ruined others, making one finally understand the fundamental truth in the rather cynical quip of a financial analyst who said the other day: it is greed that got us into this mess and it is greed that will get us out of it.
Particularly insightful are the descriptions of how kings and queens, emperors, dictators and States all played their turn in distorting, for better or worse, the environment in which the inherently unstable markets had to operate.
We ordinary mortals usually feel, with some justification, that there is very little we can do to change the way the world of finance works. Read this book and you will at least understand why…