The Ascent of Money: A Financial History of the World by Niall Ferguson

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A review by Robert Skidelsky

1.

The historian Alan Taylor used to say, mischievously, that the only point of history is history. The idea that one could use it to predict the future, still more to avoid past mistakes, was pure illusion. Niall Ferguson's The Ascent of Money, a history of financial innovation written as a television documentary as well as a book, offers a neat test of Taylor's theory. Ferguson can claim some powers of anticipation. History convinced him in 2006 that the good times could not last "indefinitely." This was an insight to which the Nobel Prize–winning mathematical economists who devised the Black-Scholes formula -- the complicated model for pricing share options used by the highly leveraged firm Long-Term Capital Management, which famously crashed in 1998 -- were oblivious. Their formula persuaded them that a massive sell-off could occur only once in four million years.

History has alerted Ferguson to the perils of the state relying on the bond market for its financing. On Lou...

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