Customer Reviews

Money Machine (Penguin Business Library)

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4 star:		(1)
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This is an excellent guide to the basics of money and financing.

The book focuses on London as a financial center and the British finanacial system in general, making frequent comparisons to New York and global practices. However, as it describes financial basics I think the that it would be useful to people almost anywhere interested in understanding such basics as: interest rates, banking, shares, insurance, foreign exchange, etc.

I was most impressed by Coggan's clear explanations helped by historical descriptions, e.g. goldsmiths and silversmiths became the earliest bankers when they stored gold and silver in their safes for nervous citizens. Then, when they noticed that of all the gold and silver stored in their vaults only a small amount was required for withdrawal, and this amount was roughly matched by new deposits, the idea of lending the idle gold and silver was born. The earliest smiths were from Italy and did their business from wooden benches in the market places. The Italian for bench is "banco" and was corrupted into the English word "bank".... Suddenly at the hands of Coggan banking seems like a very human enterprise and becomes easy to understand.

Coggan's knowledge is obviously thorough and his explanations are excellent. I highly recommend this book. Comments to LearningResearch@Cox.net

I bought this book about 5 years ago when I first got a job in the UK Financial Industry. It covers all the basics and you can start with little or no previous knowledge (I did!). To illustrate his point he includes examples of Indices, Exchange Rates, Unit Trust prices etc. from the Financial Times newspaper. It is easy to understand too. Can't recommend it highly enough.

I read this book to see how others have attempted to a holistic descriptions of the market place. This is actually not bad. If you have a lot of work experience you may find it a little basic in parts.

As for my research, I like that it draws out a lot of the different players/financial systems/institutions that are involved. He does a decent job of articulating what motivates each area of finance. I would highly suggest this for those that are trying to learn the market environment. Though it's setting is to describe the UK, it actually is fairly accurate for the US as well. It is also useful in creating a framework for what is going on in finance, who the players are, and what drives them.