946) Uma historia monetaria: Niall Ferguson

O mais recente livro do historiador britânico, atualmente na Harvard University, Niall Ferguson:

The Ascent of Money: A financial History of the World

Apresentação sumária no site da Amazon, que também fornece o press release deste livro, como abaixo:

Review
'Niall Ferguson has written a fascinating, accessible, and important book that lives up to its rather grandiose title ... It goes from cowrie shells to mortgage-backed securities, and everything in between ... this is an exceptional book.' - Michael Casey, Irish Times

From prolific historian Ferguson (History/Harvard Univ.; The War of the World, 2006, etc.), a sweeping survey of money and its many instruments.Some years ago, writes Ferguson, a hitherto unknown tribe appeared at the edge of the Amazonian rainforest. The people had subsisted for generations on hunting and gathering. They had no conception of money; not surprisingly, Ferguson adds, they had no concept of futurity, either. Now they live near a city, subsisting on food brought by strangers with no demand for anything in return. Shedding the hunting-and-gathering lifestyle was a first step toward the larger prosperity of humankind, Ferguson suggests - contra Marshall Sahlins's Stone Age Economics (1974) - while other instruments compelled us farther along the evolutionary path. One was the development of credit and debt, "as important as any technological innovation in the rise of civilization, from ancient Babylon to present-day Hong Kong." Ferguson takes a view similar to that of Jacob Bronowski (the title being homage to The Ascent of Man), and he offers plenty of nuts-and-bolts information. Every day, $2 trillion changes hands, and every single second of the day someone is selling something to someone else, a far more congenial use of time and energy than war, counting coup and other pastimes of our tribe writ large. War, after all, is a leading cause of inflation, one of the constant enemies in Ferguson's pages; another is bad faith, which Ferguson attends to in a nicely scathing exegesis of the Enron affair. The author is a fluent interpreter, whether writing of the origins of the hedge fund, the workings of international trade deficits or the securitization of home mortgages - the last of which is the cause of so much current worry. He avoids the aridity of economics without skimping on details, offering lots of bang for the buck.A useful introduction to the world of drachmas, dinars and dollars. (Kirkus Reviews)

Review
`Niall Ferguson has written a fascinating, accessible, and important book that lives up to its rather grandiose title ... It goes from cowrie shells to mortgage-backed securities, and everything in between ... this is an exceptional book.'

Ele deve ser traduzido e publicado entre nos, como foi seu livro anterior da mesma area, Cash Nexus.

Abaixo, ainda do site da Amazon, um primeiro resenhista-leitor (que aparentemente escreve em inglês britânico, pelo civilisation):

Comments by Michael Calum Jacques author of '1st Century Radical', 21 Nov 2008

The title of this book makes quite a claim. Niall Ferguson is a Harvard University professor from the UK, who produced a volume on the story of the Rothschild financial dynasty in the late 1990s, The book certainly has a number of interesting features e.g. its summary of recent events both precipitating and within the housing market and international commercial relationships between superpowers. Nevertheless, the impression is that the work - fascinating though it is in parts - may just have been a little bit 'scraped together', somewhat hurried.

Given the lightening blitz which has rocked all corners, streets and avenues of the globe's financial institutions, this is perhaps understandable and even forgivable, almost. Recent news bulletins have featured housing crises, bank runs and a possible recession looming forbiddingly. Given that he presumably had only human resources at his disposal, the author may well have reached for a crystal ball as a source of greater predictability than the global market indicators have been able to offer any of us, himself included, of late.

Returning to our initial point, viz. the sheer scope this work claims to encompass, this reviewer particularly appreciated Ferguson's sweep through the civilisations of the past in this Financial History of the World; thus the Inca's spurning of gold and silver as money, the pre-Christian Mesopotamian/Babylonian credit notes in the form of clay tablets and many more indicators of the development of, and various civilisations' attitudes towards, money and finance in general. Yet Ferguson omits to make, as far as this reviewer can see, any reference to the light which spectral analysis technology (through its illumination of discarded domestic papyri texts) has thrown on the surprising wealth of certain women within the ancient world.

Ferguson's philosophy, which he keeps hidden up his sleeve for most of the book, proposes that finance evolves through natural selection. He uses this hypothesis to account for the appearance and denigration of new financial models which respond to new demands made by various societies. That analysis may risk a degree of oversimplification, but that will be variously assessed by the background, training, and disposition of the reader. All that being said, this is a challenging and a stimulating read.

Michael Calum Jacques