I was drawn to this book after watching BBC documentary from same author. There are lots of facts presented in understandable and logical manner. Great book for financial education. Last part, prologue, added recently is explaining problems running in monetary world during financial crisis of 2008 with fine explanations of mistakes people are doing in their research and analysis which is worth of book alone.
I would like that author tried to incorporate Veblen thoughts more into this work although he is citing Veblen in this book. Veblen theories of conspicuous consumption would increase quality of explanations in chapters about houses and Chinamerica. ( )

Very clear, well-written history of finance and financial innovation. Written in the midst of last year's credit crunch, after the Bear Sterns bail out but before the Lehman Brothers collapse, there is a clear note of the urgency of the events of the time and the potential for meltdown ahead. This later section of the book was a shift away from the detailed historical examination of such events as the creation of bonds in medieval Florence, the bets, and fortune, made by Nathan Rothschild on the Napoleonic wars and the creation of the insurance market, closely tied to developments in mathematics. Overall, a clean and neat, easy to read, history-heavy book. ( )

A good look at the history of finance and the role it has played in history since the development of bond markets. This isn’t as much of a big-idea book as James Burke’s Connections or Jared Diamond’s Guns, Germs, and Steel, but it provides another valuable perspective on many historical events, so I’m shelving it next to those volumes. It also shows the benefits of financial markets when they operate well, which is a good counterbalance to some of the general outcry against capitalism as a reaction to the excesses of the bad deregulation in the 1980–2007 period. ( )

I just finished [The Ascent of Money] by [Niall Ferguson]. Ferguson says that the purpose of this book is to educate. He quotes a number of statistics about widespread ignorance of financial matters. He also makes a statement that rather than being "filty lucre", money is the root of most progress.

I'd say he does a decent job in the first few chapters just in introducing various financial ideas. It begins by talking about the start of banking systems. He points out how Spain's extraction of gold from Peru was a mixed blessing, because, even if it the money supply is gold, the expansion of the money supply still devalues the currency. And, because they were rolling in gold, Spain got left behind in other developments.

What will probably stick with me is the story about the Dutch East India company, the first, or one of the first, stock corporations, and how it spread the risk, and produced a decent return for a long time.

He goes on to do a pretty good job of explaining why bond prices can fluctuate depending on risk, and what hedge funds are. I have to admit, that, by that time, I was anxious for the book to end. There was so much going on at the end, as it got into more recent events, that I was overwhelmed. This is probably because I am not really very interested in the financial markets in themselves.

What I am interested in (and had some hope in the early chapters that Ferguson might address) is how you can have an economic system with some of the benefits of a modified capitalism - which I see as the fluency of money as a means of exchange, and being able for some at least to accumulate some capital to do some creative things - and yet not be locked into the boom/bust cycle. In other words the boom/bust cycle could be described as having to consume for the economy to be healthy - by healthy I mean providing a livlihood to the great mass of people, and providing a means for them to develop themselves (as opposed to making a killing). Not only do we have to consume, so the economy won't contract, but even that is not enough to ensure that there aren't huge groups of people unable to live adequately while others have more wealth than they could ever use.

We're told the health of the economy is affected by the health of the automobile industry, yet I want people to buy fewer cars. We should have fewer cars, and better ways of getting around. We need an economic system that allows for less consumption for some, and more for those whose basic needs are not being met now. I want to read books by people who are beginning to puzzle out what that system is.

While this book wasn't that, it did give some pretty clear explanations of some basic financial institutions and some of their history. It's worth a read, but don't feel bad if you abandon it somewhere in the middle. ( )