Featured Book & Author
                                               ascentofmoney                     ferguson
The Ascent of Money: A Financial History of the World
by
Niall Ferguson
        Penguin Press 2008                           ISBN 978-59420-192-9
The terms and products of modern Economics and Finance seem to many of us like some forbidding present day beastiary with their deflation and inflation, bubbles and busts, algorithms, securitzation, soverign debt, central banking, fractional reserve banking, credit default swaps and so forth, and so forth.  For those of us who don't make our livings in these arcane, hermetic fields, books dealing with such subjects are certainly not the first places we turn in search of enjoyable reading. Well, here's the exception. The author writes enjoyably and clearly, as does he speak. (We've embedded a few videos of his interviews)

The book sets forth the origins and subsequent development of all major sectors of finance including banking, fiat currencies, stocks and bonds and their markets, and insurance and its products. His "evolutionary" approach brings a great deal of clarity to these areas. They're a great mine of human foolishness and the author has a good time with much of this as well.

But the serious purpose of the present work is explained in the final portion of the author's Introduction.

            "But a great dying of financial institutions is one that we should worry about, as another
              man-made disaster works its way slowly and painfully through the global financial system.
              For all these reasons, then - whether you are struggling to make ends meet or striving to be
              a master of the universe - it has never been more necessary to understand the ascent of
              money than it is today. If this book helps to break down that dangerous barrier which has
              arisen between financial knowledge and other kinds of knowledge, then I shall not have
              toiled in vain." 
Niall Campbell Douglas Ferguson was born in Glasgow in 1964. He attended Glasgow Academy and received a scholarship to Magdalen College, Oxford. He graduated from Oxford with honors in, appropriately, History.  He is married with three children.

His present resume is impressive. He is Laurence A. Tisch Professor of History at Harvard University and William Ziegler Professor of Business Administration at The Harvard Business School. He is, as well, a Senior Research Fellow of Jesus College, Oxford and a Senior Fellow of the Hoover Institution, Stanford University. He is a faculty member of the Minda de Gunzburg Center for European Studies and is also an Advisory Fellow of the Barsanti Military History Center at the University of North Texas.

Beginning this year (2010) he will occupy the Philippe Roman Chair in History and International Affairs at the London School of Economics.

Ferguson is presently a contributing editor of the London Sunday Telegraph.
Books by the Author:


(2008). The Ascent of Money: A Financial History of the World. London: Allen Lane. ISBN 978-1846141065.

(2006). The War of the World: History's Age of Hatred. London: Allen Lane. ISBN 0-7139-9708-7.

(2003). Empire: The Rise and Demise of the British World Order and the Lessons for Global Power. New York:
                Basic Books.                       ISBN 0-465-02328-2.

(2005). 1914. Pocket Penguins 70s S.. London, England: Penguin Books Ltd. ISBN 0-14-102220-5.

(2004). Colossus: The Rise And Fall Of The American Empire. Gardners Books. ISBN 0-7139-9770-2.
 
(2003). Empire: How Britain Made the Modern World. London: Allen Lane. ISBN 0-7139-9615-3.
 
(2001). The Cash Nexus: Money and Power in the Modern World, 1700-2000. London: Allen Lane. ISBN 0-7139-9465-7.

(1999) [1997]. Virtual History: Alternatives and Counterfactuals. New York: Basic Books. ISBN 0-465-02322-3.

(1999) [1998]. The Pity of War. New York: Basic Books. ISBN 0-465-05711-X.

(1999). The House of Rothschild: The World's Banker, 1849–1999. New York, N.Y.: Viking. ISBN 0-670-88794-3.

(1998). The World's Banker: The History of the House of Rothschild. London: Weidenfeld & Nicolson.
                 ISBN 0-297-81539-3.
 
(1998). The House of Rothschild. New York, N.Y.: Viking. ISBN 0-670-85768-8.
 
(1995). Paper and Iron: Hamburg Business and German Politics in the Era of Inflation, 1897–1927. Cambridge, UK:                                            Cambridge University Press. ISBN 0-521-47016-1.
                           
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