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

Financial history has not ended, any more than political history ended with the fall of the Berlin Wall. But the next financial crisis will not be like the last one. It will not be triggered by defaults in US subprime mortgages, nor transmitted round the world by under-capitalized banks. It will be different because no two financial crises are ever

For American taxpayers, the Savings and Loans debacle was a hugely expensive lesson in the perils of ill-considered deregulation.

key components of the financial system: the bond market, the stock market, the insurance market, the real estate market and the extraordinary globalization of all these markets

The central relationship that money crystallizes is between lender and borrower.

At Bretton Woods, in New Hampshire’s White Mountains, the soon-to-be-victorious Allies met in July 1944 to devise a new financial architecture for the post-war world. In this new order, trade would be progressively liberalized, but restrictions on capital movements would remain in place. Exchange rates would be fixed, as under the gold standard, bu

Securitization had produced the most toxic financial assets in the world – Fabrice Tourre was just one of an army of financial engineers manufacturing them – and had spread them far beyond the originating banks; revealingly, the near-total collapse of securitization in the course of 2008 was a key feature of the crisis.

In 1947 the total value added by the financial sector to US gross domestic product was 2.3 per cent; by 2007 its contribution had risen to 8.1 per cent of GDP. In other words, approximately $1 of every $13 paid to employees in the United States now went to people working in finance.5 Finance had become even more important in Britain, where it accou

Credit and debt, in short, are among the essential building blocks of economic development, as vital to creating the wealth of nations

the ascent of money has been essential to the ascent of man. Far from being the work of mere leeches intent on sucking the life’s blood out of indebted families or gambling with the savings of widows and orphans, financial innovation has been an indispensable factor in man’s advance from wretched subsistence to the giddy heights of material prosper