The Ascent of Money: A Financial History of the World Kindle Edition

Niall Ferguson has written an easily accessible and very entertaining history of finance, ranging from the clay tokens of Mesopotamia 5,000 years ago to the hedge funds of today. The title of this book has apparently been modelled on Jacob Bronowski's "The Ascent of Man," and like that book it will be made into a television series. Being a television celebrity is not something that wins the admiration of one's peers in the history profession, to say the least. But those little rebukes are relatively mild compared to the scorn he received for his political views in Empire: The Rise and Demise of the British World Order and the Lessons for Global Power and Colossus: The Rise and Fall of the American Empire. In those works he argued that empire was beneficial not only to the mother country but the dominated countries as well. In this work he chronicles not only the history of money but also makes a case for liberalized finance.

Ferguson examines the financial subplot behind some of the major historical powers such as the role of money in ancient Mesopotamia, the denarius in Roman society, and gold and silver in the civilization of the Incas. He is very good in his descriptions of financial families like the Medicis and the Rothchilds, and how they became banking dynasties. Another memorable episode was the rise of Amsterdam as the world's financial center and the center's subsequent shift to London.

History is also filled with financial disasters of which we are well aware today. Ferguson tells the story of John Law and how he became France's head of finance. He engineered a financial bubble that took them several generations to overcome. Making matters worse, it occurred at the same time as the British South Sea Bubble.

Also instructive is the history of the first great globalization (1870-1914). (For this period also read Jeffrey Frieden's Global Capitalism: Its Fall and Rise in the Twentieth Century.) The world had become so economically interdependent that the pundits believed the possibility of war between great powers had been eliminated. This sentiment was famously expressed in "The Great Illusion" by Norman Angell.

Although this book was written before the current economic crisis, the last chapter is very prescient. "From Empire to Chimerica" tells of the symbiotic relationship between China and America. The combined country "accounts for just over a 10th of the world's land surface, a quarter of its population, and a third of its economic output, and more than half of the global economic growth of the last eight years". This relationship, in which China saves and America spends, and in which China's savings is used to enable America to spend even more, is clearly unsustainable. Ferguson sees this savings glut as the cause of the current subprime crisis. That, in my humble opinion, was one of the causes; there were many bad actors involved in this catastrophe, citizen-borrowers included.

Although it is not obvious to everyone in the midst of a crisis, Ferguson correctly points out that financial engineering is one of the great forces behind human progress. The history of finance is a process of creative destruction. Financial risk-taking is necessary for economic expansion and human development, and Ferguson does a good job in making the case. Too bad it reads like a script made for the History Channel.

Niall Ferguson's THE ASCENT OF MONEY, as its subtitle promises, is a broad overview of financial history, from the dawn of the first form of currency in Ancient Mesopotamia to the proliferation of complex residential asset-backed securities early in the twenty-first century. In six chapters, Ferguson traces the genesis and evolution of the pillars of modern finance: currency, bonds, corporate stock, insurance, and real estate. A final chapter focuses on the US and China's symbiotic debtor-creditor relationship, and an afterword discusses the current global recession and includes a somewhat strained evolutionary analogy comparing financial development to natural selection.

The objective here is to illuminate the modern economic system by surveying its historical origins, and to a large extent, Ferguson succeeds. The book is targeted to a lay audience and such readers are certain to walk away from a reading with an enhanced understanding of modern economics. The author generally takes the time to explain even elementary concepts in an effective manner, but there are also several maddening instances throughout where he casually references somewhat arcane metrics and complex ideas (e.g., VaR) without any explanation as to their meaning and significance. In this respect, Ferguson can be at times simultaneously too basic for the advanced reader and too complex for the novice.

Never dry reading, the narrative flows freely over its 358 pages, with perhaps the most interesting and edifying chapters being those on the bond, equity, and real estate markets. I especially enjoyed Ferguson's exploration of the five stages of "bubble" (displacement, euphoria, mania, distress, and revulsion).

Ultimately, though, the book will be of most benefit to those with a casual interest in economics, as it is entirely descriptive and not prescriptive. Ferguson never really offers anything resembling a thesis, nor does he reveal his own views except for the most fleeting of moments when singing the virtues of late-19th/early-20th century imperialism. He is focused exclusively on reporting, not analyzing. As such, THE ASCENT OF MONEY, though well-written, does not transcend its status as a historical chronicle and will be of trivial value to those seeking a sophisticated economic treatise.