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.
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42recommend
69mentions
49people
2009–2024years
78% recommend17% neutral4% critical
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What Hacker News says
- The vice angle is that when inflation increases faster than wage work, people switch from a longer term wage, to selling what they can negotiate spot prices for to keep up with inflation - like the value of a bet in gambling, or client prices in prostitution. Wiemar was the complete destruction of a social fabric under reparations and inflation, and the vice businesses that sprung up as people switched from regular wages to survive caused the social reaction that produced the second world war. Unmitigated inflation reduces people to animals.
Inflation destroys stability in the labour market and incentivises piece work to stay afloat.
Fixing the price of goods does not create stable money, it just creates huge black markets in foreign and alternative currency. Ask Argentina, Cuba, and the former USSR.
If you are interested in the history of money and banking, I highly recommend the book The Ascent of Money by Niall Ferguson as a basis for what most interested people outside of finance understand about how money works.
- ”The Ascent of Money” by Niall Ferguson
- NPR's "Planet Money" does an outstanding job in explaining economics and finance in general. The podcast has been around for years so you can listen to past episodes until you get sick of it. I don't know the number but they have to be in the hundreds.
To get a bit of background here's a book that's fun to read. It doesn't get too deep in the weeds. It gives you just enough info to be dangerous.
"New Ideas from Dead Economists by Todd G. Buchholz"
Also, "The Ascent of Money - Financial History of the World by Niall Ferguson" is a great read as away to get some historical background on how our financial system came to be. Little to no jargon so it's a fast and entertaining read.
Not an economics' book but a view into how our factory based food system works. I think it's worth reading as a way to understand our Economy's food factories.
"Twinkie, Deconstructed: My Journey to Discover How the Ingredients Found in Processed Foods Are Grown, Mined (Yes, Mined), and Manipulated into What America Eats"
- I'm assuming you mean that want to understand monetary policy, what makes money trustworthy/valuable, inflation, etc. Here are a few books that I thought were good, but I also wish I knew about a single better resource:
- The Ascent of Money: A Financial History of the World by Niall Ferguson (This also has a documentary)
- Principles for Dealing with the Changing World Order: Why Nations Succeed or Fail by Ray Dalio (not directly about money but does a good job at explaining reserve currencies, types of currencies, debt cycles, inflation, all of which are related)
- What is Money, anyway? [0]
- Accounting is also a strange field because its a bunch of almost unrelated fields stuck together. Accounting covers financial accounting (dealing with recording transactions, representing reality, etc), tax, management and cost accounting (things like tracking performance, figuring out what the widget you produced actually costs you, once you've included the direct costs and an estimate of overhead) and a whole slew of other things like internal controls, governance questions (how do you align incentives in an organization?), etc. Picking up a textbook on financial accounting is probably a good starting place to get the basics of debits/credits, but from there it depends what your interests are.
For books on finance, I recommend Niall Ferguson's Ascent of Money as a pretty good introduction into the history of finance and how it all sortof fits together.
- Surprised the books from Niall Ferguson are not mentioned:
-- Ferguson, Niall - The Ascent of Money
-- Ferguson, Niall - The Cash Nexus
The standards of Niall Ferguson are very, very, very high. I would also keep an eye n his site, niallferguson.com , particularly on his ongoing journalistic production: https://www.niallferguson.com/journalism
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