The Ascent of Money: A Financial History of the World: 10th Anniversary Edition - Softcover

Ferguson, Niall

Softcover

ISBN 10: 0143116177 ISBN 13: 9780143116172

Verlag: Penguin Publishing Group, 2009

Inhaltsangabe

The 10th anniversary edition, with new chapters on the crash, Chimerica, and cryptocurrency

"[An] excellent, just in time guide to the history of finance and financial crisis." —The Washington Post

"Fascinating." —Fareed Zakaria, Newsweek

In this updated edition, Niall Ferguson brings his classic financial history of the world up to the present day, tackling the populist backlash that followed the 2008 crisis, the descent of "Chimerica" into a trade war, and the advent of cryptocurrencies, such as Bitcoin, with his signature clarity and expert lens.
 
The Ascent of Money reveals finance as the backbone of history, casting a new light on familiar events: the Renaissance enabled by Italian foreign exchange dealers, the French Revolution traced back to a stock market bubble, the 2008 crisis traced from America's bankruptcy capital, Memphis, to China's boomtown, Chongqing. We may resent the plutocrats of Wall Street but, as Ferguson argues, the evolution of finance has rivaled the importance of any technological innovation in the rise of civilization. Indeed, to study the ascent and descent of money is to study the rise and fall of Western power itself.

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Über die Autorin bzw. den Autor

Niall Ferguson is one of the world's most renowned historians. He is the author of Paper and Iron, The House of Rothschild, The Pity of War, The Cash Nexus, Empire, Colossus, The War of the World, The Ascent of Money, High Financier, Civilization, The Great Degeneration, Kissinger, 1923-1968: The Idealist, and The Square and the Tower. He is Senior Fellow at the Hoover Institution, Stanford University, and a Visiting Professor at Tsinghua University, Beijing. His many awards include the Benjamin Franklin Prize for Public Service (2010), the Hayek Prize for Lifetime Achievement (2012) and the Ludwig Erhard Prize for Economic Journalism (2013).

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1

Dreams of Avarice

Imagine a world with no money. For over a hundred years, Communists and anarchists - not to mention some extreme reactionaries, religious fundamentalists and hippies - have dreamt of just that. According to Friedrich Engels and Karl Marx, money was merely an instrument of capitalist exploitation, replacing all human relationships, even those within the family, with the callous 'cash nexus'. As Marx later sought to demonstrate in Capital, money was commoditized labour, the surplus generated by honest toil, appropriated and then 'reified' in order to satisfy the capitalist class's insatiable lust for accumulation. Such notions die hard. As recently as the 1970s, some European Communists were still yearning for a moneyless world, as in this Utopian effusion from the Socialist Standard:

Money will disappear . . . Gold can be reserved in accordance with Lenin's wish, for the construction of public lavatories . . . In communist societies goods will be freely available and free of charge. The organisation of society to its very foundations will be without money . . . The frantic and neurotic desire to consume and hoard will disappear. It will be absurd to want to accumulate things: there will no longer be money to be pocketed nor wage-earners to be hired . . . The new people will resemble their hunting and gathering ancestors who trusted in a nature which supplied them freely and often abundantly with what they needed to live, and who had no worry for the morrow . . .

Yet no Communist state - not even North Korea - has found it practical to dispense with money. And even a passing acquaintance with real hunter-gatherer societies suggests there are considerable disadvantages to the cash-free life.

Five years ago, members of the Nukak-Mak unexpectedly wandered out of the Amazonian rainforest at San Jos del Guaviare in Colombia. The Nukak were a tribe that time forgot, cut off from the rest of humanity until this sudden emergence. Subsisting solely on the monkeys they could hunt and the fruit they could gather, they had no concept of money. Revealingly, they had no concept of the future either. These days they live in a clearing near the city, reliant for their subsistence on state handouts. Asked if they miss the jungle, they laugh. After lifetimes of trudging all day in search of food, they are amazed that perfect strangers now give them all they need and ask nothing from them in return.

The life of a hunter-gatherer is indeed, as Thomas Hobbes said of the state of nature, 'solitary, poor, nasty, brutish, and short'. In some respects, to be sure, wandering through the jungle bagging monkeys may be preferable to the hard slog of subsistence agriculture. But anthropologists have shown that many of the hunter-gatherer tribes who survived into modern times were less placid than the Nukak. Among the Jivaro of Ecuador, for example, nearly 60 per cent of male deaths were due to violence. The figure for the Brazilian Yanomamo was nearly 40 per cent. When two groups of such primitive peoples chanced upon each other, it seems, they were more likely to fight over scarce resources (food and fertile women) than to engage in commercial exchange. Hunter-gatherers do not trade. They raid. Nor do they save, consuming their food as and when they find it. They therefore have no need of money.

The Money Mountain

More sophisticated societies than the Nukak have functioned without money, it is true. Five hundred years ago, the most sophisticated society in South America, the Inca Empire, was also moneyless. The Incas appreciated the aesthetic qualities of rare metals. Gold was the 'sweat of the sun', silver the 'tears of the moon'. Labour was the unit of value in the Inca Empire, just as it was later supposed to be in a Communist society. And, as under Communism, the economy depended on often harsh central planning and forced labour. In 1532, however, the Inca Empire wa

Details zur Ausgabe

• Verlag: Penguin Publishing Group
• Erscheinungsdatum: 2009
• Sprache: Englisch
• ISBN 10: 0143116177
• ISBN 13: 9780143116172
• Einband: Taschenbuch
• Anzahl der Seiten: 496
• Kontakt zum Hersteller: Harder; https://www.edel.com; ; Neum�hlen 17; Hamburg; Hamburg; 22763; Deutschland