Seize The Ascent Of Money: A Financial History Of The World Translated By Niall Ferguson Categorized In Paper Copy

has a habit of proving me wrong, Recently I wrote a review of sitelinkThe Drunkard's Walk How Randomness Rules Our Lives and said something like you generally get a better understanding of a subject if you can see the historical path that has been followed in building the subject in the first place.
This book is all historical path, but it has left me without a clearer understanding of what I had hoped to learn from it.


And this is a pity, as there are many things about money I would like a deeper understanding of.
These are things that people ALWAYS take for granted in writing these sorts of books and they are also things that I have NEVER understood.
Exactly the same thing happens with astronomy, A lot of the universe seems to be made up of matter that has formed essentially into planes our solar system is a good case in point with all of the planets going around the sun in what looks a lot like a disk.
I know that Kant was one of the people who worked out why this should be the case, but other than knowing who worked it out, no one seems to ever explain why that ought to be the case.
For years I had much the same problem with water freezing in most liquids moving from a liquid to a solid decreases the volume, water does the exact opposite.
It was only when someone explained the crystal structure of ice that this started to make sense, I do particularly like things to make sense,

My question about money has to do with the Stock Market, This is my understanding. Capitalisms great invention was the joint stock company, This was a way of raising lots of money from lots of different sources so that a company could be formed that would do what needed to be done build a railroad, put down a gas pipeline, whatever else.
The motto of capitalism could just as easily be spread the risk spread the joy, The point being that even if you had enough money on your own to build a railway it would probably not be a good idea for you to put all of your money into that one thing just in case things went terribly, terribly wrong.
By getting lots of people to put smaller amounts of money into a broader range of activities the chance of all of them turning sour at the same time is greatly reduced.
What you loose in total control, you more than make up for in avoiding sleepless nights,

So, lets say I want to start a company to build a better mousetrap, following on from the remarkable success of both Agatha Christies and Hamlets earlier versions.
I need,and so I issueshares wortheach, People are crazy enough to buy these shares and now I have my money and start researching mice and killing them.
All is good with the world, I come up with said mousetrap, one that kills mice by quoting all of the major soliloquies of Hamlet at them until they decide the answer to the question is not to be.
I start making lots of money, The value of my company goes up to,so each of the shares has doubled in price, I think I understand all of this so far, But now there is a market in my shares and people, not content with receiving dividends from the profits Im making hand over fist, want to sell my shares and take their profit in one go.
Okay, good. Lots of people decide to sell my shares at pretty much the same time perhaps there has been a bit of a slide in confidence somewhere more generally and even though the boring vermin to death mousetrap is selling well and people have even started talking about how nobly designed it is and in apprehension, how like a god and so on the general downturn in the market means people are selling stock left, right and centre which just also happens to include mine and no one seems to be interested in buying stock.
So, the price of my shares plummets,

The question I always have is well, so what Surely the only time the company ought to be worried about the price of its shares is when they are being issued as, it seems to me, this is the only time when they are going to bring in any money to the company.
What happens to the price following this would seem rather academic from the companys perspective, I issued the stock to build a company, I have built that company, that company is going well why should the stock price bother me at all

Look, I know Ive got this arse about face in some way and that is fine but my point is that I would have expected to come away from this book understanding how this sort of thing works and I didnt.
Now, dont get me wrong, Ive read lots of books on pretty much this same theme and subject and Ive never had this bit explained to me in a way I can understand.
It is very possible that Im just a dolt and have completely missed what is so utterly transparent to everyone else they dont even see the point in explaining it and as Ive said already, it wouldnt be the first time.
All the same, it would be nice if someone, somewhere could point me to a book that explains this stuff in a way that even I can understand.


The bits of this book that were particularly good were mostly towards the end when he started discussing behavioural economics.
Im becoming a big fan of this subject, but I do seriously wonder what it will end up adding to economics theory per se.
The fact we are predictably irrational sitelinkPredictably Irrational The Hidden Forces That Shape Our Decisionsis interesting enough in itself, but what will be much more interesting will be when this subject stops being about curiosities as discussed in books like sitelinkFreakonomics Rev Ed A Rogue Economist Explores the Hidden Side of Everything and when a more substantial and unified body of theory preferably able to make predictions grows up around these curious and fascinating facts.


The part of this book where he brushes aside sitelinkConfessions of an Economic Hit Man by talking about how little of a percentage of US total trade comes from Panama and therefore it simply wouldnt make sense for the US to kill their president is so silly as to beggar belief.
Surely the percentage here is not of total of US trade, but the total of Panama's trade that is dedicated to the US.
Surely too the canal should figure somewhere in these calculations it did very much so in the hit man book, And surely before dropping this argument entirely someone might want to talk about things without a direct 'economic' value to the US, say the value of having yet another UN vote always in US favour by a compliant Panama.


This writer is very much of the Chicago School never even mentions that even in its heyday and even in the US there were saltwater economists who rejected the ultraliberalism of the freshwater economists.
But economics is a political and ideological science which is another reason we should hope that adding some cutting edge psychology into the mix might help.
His mostly uncritical review of the Chilean economic miracle gives the all is sunshine version of Naomi Kleins much darker version in sitelinkThe Shock Doctrine The Rise of Disaster Capitalism.


There is a television program that goes with this I ought to watch it, I guess, but am probably unlikely to.

Most people or at least me I know this guy as a purveyor of some outrageous opinions Keynes was wrong, because he was gay, or something and partisan talking points, and his questionable approach to factchecking was sitelinkrecently highlighted by Jonathan Chait at New York magazine.
Still, with one exception an arch criticism of the excesses of the welfare state, and their putative role in the stagflation of the 's, this is a surprisingly balanced, entertaining and illuminating history of the development of the modern monetary and financial system the title is a nod to Jacob Bronowski's sitelinkThe Ascent of Man, a formative influence on the author.
Ferguson shows how banking and credit came about, how sovereign bond markets affected the rise of nations and their recalcitrant, spendthrift kings, and the rise of speculative bubbles, including themortgage crisis.
Even those unsympathetic to the classically liberal tendencies of the author would find in this book much to recommend it, Dude has a keen eye for macro history, The book is titled The Ascent of Money, but it's not about the ascent of money, It's about the path of money, with the assumption that from the origin of the The Ascent Of Money's historical perspective, money has been the bedrock of civilization.
There's no ascendancy, because there is nothing for it to compete with, in the author's telling, What the book really is is a straight history of the aboveboard financial markets, and to that extent it's a useful and largely enjoyable read, covering the move from barter to coin, and from coin to virtual funds, and from virtual funds to algorithmic trading.
The author does a wonderful job of jumping across vast time periods to draw comparisons showing how even if technology changes, human nature does not.
He does a terrible job of telling jokes, which comes across as a sort of nervous habit mostly alliteration, puns, and popculture references, one that someone close to him should point out to him.


The absence of underthecounter financial markets and their influence on, their substantial part of, the global economy seems like a significant blind spot.
There are occasional asides to the Mafia, narco states, and the like, and of course when Ponzi schemes come to light they are acknowledged.
But that's it. As such, it's sort of like this: if The Ascent of Money were a study of a city, it would only take stock so to speak of the goings on within buildings and institutions, and not of street life.
In other words, it's not a full picture, It's like a Chamber of Commerce picture, One other seeming blind spot: if I'm not mistaken, the author seems to have a disinclination toward companies that are not publicly traded.


Also: I cannot recall reading a nonfiction book recently with less of a thesis, There is no overarching theme, no consciously enacted perspective, just the steady march of economic history proceeding like a fleshedout timeline.
I'd say most fiction I read has more of a thesis, more of a sense of perspective on the world, than this book does.


To be clear, there is a concluding section in which the correlations between biological evolution and monetarysystem change is compared.
But in effect what has happened is that after dropping occasional references to such a metaphor throughout the book, he then tries to tie it all together.
In other words, the equation to produce this book was: write a history of largely western economics at a largely macro level, and then add a final chapter proposing a model, supported only by parenthetical references in the majority of the book.
A comparison is not a thesis, especially when the comparison feels added on, Furthermore, the evolution metaphor is seriously sloppy, For a widely traveled professor at Harvard, he has created a looseatbest metaphor with a floating subject that changes according to the need of his rhetoric, on a moment by moment, sentence by sentence basis: Has money ascended, like man is said to have Has the nature of business Has the market If, as the author states, complex technological innovations haven't actually supplanted earlier modes like barter and loan sharks, then how can the comparison to mankind be made Are we humans surrounded by our own competing ancestors And if in fact this is about an ecological comparison, and not a oneonone to mankind, then why not just say so Because comparisons to man allow for the idea of the free market having a rational hivemind sentience Because The Ascent of Man sounds like a better logline than The Ecology of Money It's altogether unclear.
If after this much effort a The Ascent Of Money's thesis cannot be plainly stated, then it does not have one, What it has is a paper wrapper,

And as a side note, I may be mistaken, but the book seems to clarify when an economist is leftleaning but not when rightleaning.
And the fact that George Soros and several other figures in finance are Jewish is pointed out, but no other religion is listed with any particular frequency when other major figures are mentioned.


One final thing: There is an anecdote about the film Mary Poppins early in the book that I highly recommend reading.
I can't do it justice, but in brief: the author was invited to speak at a business event, and since the tone of his talk was somewhat negative about the economic short term and midterm, several of the attendees all

successful businesspeople complained afterword, essentially taking issue with the presence of a nonbusinessperson, especially one deemed not enough of an optimistic booster.
One of these complaints stated that they should have ditched him and just shown the movie Mary Poppins, The author then takes the opportunity to point out the extent to which Mary Poppins' plot rests on the instability of British banks.

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