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The Ascent of Money: A Financial History of the World
Penguin Search Penguin by Niall Ferguson Search Niall Ferguson
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Customer Reviews:
Informative and stimulating
First class product. It combines the authors knowledge of finance with the history of money. Certainly worth listening to.
What an interesting book
I thought that this book was going to be boring and dry especially because I never really liked history that much. However, I enjoyed reading it and found it educational. We all use money, but never think too much about it. Money is just an idea. It is something that we believe has value. This is a very good book explaining the origins of money and all the financial instruments such as stocks, bonds, derivatives, insurance, and home mortgages. I like the explanation of how these financial innovations helped our economies grow and improved our standard of living.
Listening to economists today, we don't get this type of explanation. Very few of them understand the history behind money and financial instruments. If they did, they would understand that the current financial crisis and Ponzi schemes are nothing new. I want to thank the author for doing writing this book. I don't think I will ever think of money the same way again.
- Mariusz Skonieczny, author of Why Are We So Clueless about the Stock Market? Learn how to invest your money, how to pick stocks, and how to make money in the stock market
Money makes the world go round? 
Niall Ferguson is firmly in the camp of 'Money makes the world go round' rather then 'Money is the root of all evil'.
He dismisses the whole of human prehistory in a couple of pages, citing the example of a small band of Amazonian Indians who emerged from the jungle a few years ago and decided that they would rather live in a cash society where they were beggars, than a cashless society where they were free to hunt and gather.
But what about tribes like the Pirahas who live in a cashless, hunter-gatherer society and have resisted all attempts at conversion and modernisation for the last 300 years and are described by anthropologists as 'the happiest people on Earth'? Mr. Ferguson should stick to subjects like economics at which he excels, rather than anthropology of which he clearly knows very little.
The remainder of human history, right up to the end of the middle ages, is given similar short shrift and Mr. Ferguson's story really only begins with the Italian renaissance merchants. Rather than 'The Ascent of Money' a more appropriate title for this book would be 'A Modern Economic History' but this would not have been nearly so catchy a title nor sold nearly so many books!
Having said that, Mr. Ferguson's 'Modern Economic History' is extremely well written and informative and greatly helps our understanding of how we got from renaissance merchants to modern investment banks and hedge funds, but I was disappointed that the development of money itself was not explored in more detail.
The Ascent of Money
As an investement banker myself, I found this book superb and thought provoking. Realising that history does indeed repeat itself and today's economic crisis resembles disasters in centuaries past. I ended up buying a second one as a gift, even before finished reading it. Niall Furguson has illustrated a sound understanding of a broad range of financial topics and relayed this back to the average reader in perfect layman's language. This man has a future in writing text books or the 'how to' guides. Highly Recommended
Ascent of money
Insightful any intelligent view of a subject I rather took for granted. Development and evolution of market mechanisms made this a book well worth reading. Good history and also some academic introduction to the theory of credit and related market mechanisms. Written in a lively and fascinating way, excellent read
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by: niall ferguson - isbn-13 978-0-14-103548-2 (isbn-10 0-14-103548-x)
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