During these past months I have been going through two books related to my interests. If you are really interested about finance and economics, then I can really recommend you to check this books.
I have enjoyed both books very much. The Ascent of Money is great because it goes through history. Something that in my school at least, isn't taught much at all. Information it offers I find to be very interesting and I believe that we should learn more from history. The Ascent of Money is also about historical crisis, more than Crisis Economics which is more about the present situation and how to explain that. As a fan of history I find The Ascent of Money to be much more interesting and find it to be a valuable teacher, if you want to learn to understand what happened in history and how to relate those things to present and the future. History rely tends to repeat itself.
Few words about the book by others:
Review of The Ascent of Money, by
MoneyScience.
We've all got money on the brain. The high drama of the credit crunch and banking crisis, combined with everyday fears of job loss, negative equity and poverty, have brought financial matters to the fore. On the face of it, this is the perfect time for Niall Ferguson to produce The Ascent of Money: a Financial History of the World.The difficulty is that far from ascending, money seems to be in free-fall. Ferguson acknowledges this, and admits that his title may appear "to sound an incongruously optimistic note". But he argues that the financial system is simply "the mirror of mankind, revealing…the way we value ourselves and the resources of the world around us. It is not the fault of the mirror if it reflects our blemishes as well as our beauty." Ferguson attempts to evacuate markets of any moral content. It is our greed and ignorance that have created the current crisis, rather than the financial system. There is some truth in this. Some collective responsibility must be borne for the over-stretched budgets of the households and exchequers of the West.But Ferguson's biography of finance, told with verve and insight, throws more light on our predicament than perhaps even he realises. The Ascent of Money charts the rise of money from clay tokens passed around the villages of Mesopotamia 5,000 years ago to flickering numbers on a foreign exchange screen; yet it also reminds us that money represents a relationship of trust.
Description
Bread, cash, dosh, dough, loot: Call it what you like, it matters. To Christians, love of it is the root of all evil. To generals, it's the sinews of war. To revolutionaries, it's the chains of labour. But in The Ascent of Money, Niall Ferguson shows that finance is in fact the foundation of human progress. What's more, he reveals financial history as the essential back-story behind all history.
The evolution of credit and debt was as important as any technological innovation in the rise of civilization, from ancient Babylon to the silver mines of Bolivia. Banks provided the material basis for the splendours of the Italian Renaissance, while the bond market was the decisive factor in conflicts from the Seven Years' War to the American Civil War.
With the clarity and verve for which he is famed, Niall Ferguson explains why the origins of the French Revolution lie in a stock market bubble caused by a convicted Scots murderer. He shows how financial failure turned Argentina from the world's sixth richest country into an inflation-ridden basket case - and how a financial revolution is propelling the world's most populous country from poverty to power in a single generation.
Yet the most important lesson of the financial history is that sooner or later every bubble bursts - sooner or later the bearish sellers outnumber the bullish buyers - sooner or later greed flips into fear. And that's why, whether you're scraping by or rolling in it, there's never been a better time to understand the ascent of money.
Part of
Ruth Sunderland's review of Crisis Economics.
History suggests international banking crises are often the harbinger of sovereign debt defaults and collapsed currencies, as we are seeing in Greece – if the imbalances persist, that could be just a taste of things to come.This book is a tightly argued, convincing assault on the free-market ideology that allowed the finance sector to hijack the global economy. It has a strong message for governments, including our own newly minted coalition. Making markets function better demands a bigger role for government, not a smaller one. Politicians will have to square up to the banks, and if workers are to navigate an uncertain world of employment they will need support in education, retraining, portable pensions and a benefits safety net, along with tax systems that reduce inequality.Its most important insight is its simplest: that economists, politicians, and Wall Street traders allowed themselves to be seduces by the free market, and the limitless wonders of financial innovation. So, wether we were aware of it or not, did many of the rest of us. We were lulled into thinking we could carry on living beyond our means. This is a wake-up call.
