Timed to cash in on the release of his latest book, but perhaps ill timed in light of today’s financial climate, historian Niall Ferguson fronts The Ascent of Money: A Financial History of the World, starting tonight on Channel 4.

Ferguson’s line is that “financial history as the essential back-story behind all history,” and as such he takes us on a whistle stop tour of the world, first stopping off at Bolivia, heartland if the former Incan empire and from there introduces us to inflation, charting the blame for the decline of the Spanish Empire at the door of the Conquistadors who flooded Europe with so much precious metal, that silver became next to worthless.

The first part, entitled Dreams Of Avarice sees Ferguson introducing us the origins of banking, credit and debt and how today’s market conditions amount to little more than a footnote in history’s great narrative. Little comfort when you’re struggling to put petrol in your car though, eh Ferg?

Next up, he takes us to Venice, the “great money-lending laboratory” of medieval Europe, the birthplace of interest, and the home of Shylock, the fictional moneylender from Shakespeare’s Merchant of Venice, and then to Shettleston, the area of Glasgow notorious for its loan sharks and ‘debt collectors’, and later to the offices of the Medici in 15th Century Florence.

Later Ferguson takes us to Memphis, Tennessee – the so-called the ‘bankruptcy capital of the world’, where he shows us “an entire economic sector based on people being broke”, where there are strings of supermarket-sized pawn shops, advance payment lenders and even a blood bank which pays out donors “$25 a pop” for a pint of blood.

Ultimately, Ferguson for all his glorification of money, is highly critical of the unregulated borrowing and lending that led to the creation of the world’s first “subprime superpower.” Nowhere near as boring as it sounds, The Ascent of Money is essential viewing for everyone right about now, and is, politically even-handed examination of the rise of the modern banking system.

This entry was posted on Monday, November 17th, 2008 at 10:39 am and is filed under Banking, Credit Cards, Housing Market, Loans, Mortgages. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can leave a response, or trackback from your own site.