Price of Time
A comprehensive and profoundly relevant history of interest from one of the world's leading financial writers, The Price of Time explains our current global financial position and how we got here In the beginning was the loan, and the loan carried interest. For at least five millennia people have been borrowing and lending at interest. The practice wasn't always popular--in the ancient world, usury was generally viewed as exploitative, a potential path to debt bondage and slavery. Yet as capitalism became established from the late Middle Ages onwards, denunciations of interest were tempered because interest was a necessary reward for lenders to part with their capital. And interest performs many other vital functions: it encourages people to save; enables them to place a value on precious assets, such as houses and all manner of financial securities; and allows us to price risk. All economic and financial activities take place across time. Interest is often described as the "price of money," but it is better called the "price of time: " time is scarce, time has value, interest is the time value of money. Over the first two decades of the twenty-first century, interest rates have sunk lower than ever before.
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6recommend
9mentions
8people
2022–2025years
78% recommend11% neutral11% critical
Mentions per year
What Hacker News says
- I hear you, he's the most vocal at the moment, but low interest rates have been popular among many policymakers and intellectuals throughout the history of monetary policy.
_The Price of Time: The Real Story of Interest_ by Edward Chancellor goes in depth on this, a really interesting read.
- I feel like Graeber's book is another (left leaning) fad to glom on to, like Piketty's book some years back.
I found this book, The Price of Time by Edward Chancellor [1], very useful for understanding the development of money and debt over history. It's so detailed and clearly extensively researched.
- Another book in this vein is The Price of Time: The Real Story of Interest by Edward Chancellor if anyone is looking for one.
- I'm listening to the audiobook "The Price of Time" right now and it gives chapter after chapter of empirical evidence.
Friedman was absolutely not the first economist to notice the connection between monetary supply and inflation. Locke wrote against artificial low interest rates in the 18th century.
- I love reading salty HN comments.
Debt (credit) is and will be a crucial part of any functioning economy and society. It's been around for millennia [0]
[0]The Price of Time: The Real Story of Interest is a wonderful book on subject.
- Price of Time by Chancellor. Out of the new books I read, will be a classic of financial history. It isn't technical, it isn't a complete critique of QE but it is the most understandable, fully-explained critique...also well-timed (again, Chancellor wrote a book in 1999 about financial bubbles).
